The Insect - free ebook by Jules Michelet

[ii]

THE PURSUIT. See page 158 ....

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[v]

T he Insect" is one of the four remarkable works in which the late M. Michelet embodied the results of a loving and persevering study of Nature. These works are absolutely unique; the poetry of Science was never before illustrated on so large a scale, or with so much vividness of fancy, or in so eloquent a style. The aspects of Nature were never before examined with so strong an enthusiasm or so definite an individuality,—with so eager a desire to identify them with the feelings, hopes, and aspi

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[vi]

[A] Macmillan's Magazine , July 1874, pp. 231, 232. Whether the reader endorses this high eulogium or not, he will certainly, in "The Insect," as in "The Bird," find a new stimulus to the study of Nature, and a fresh proof of the power and fancy of one of the greatest of modern French writers. Of the present translation, it is necessary only to say that it has been executed with a conscientious adherence to the original, and with an effort to preserve, as far as possible, its peculiarities of st

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[xii]

I. THE LIVING INFINITE. We have followed the Bird in all its liberties of flight, and space, and light; but the Earth which we quitted would not quit us. The sweet melodies of the winged world could not prevent us from hearing the murmur of an infinite world of shadow and silence, which, wanting the speech of man, expresses itself, nevertheless, with eloquent force, by means of a myriad mute tongues. A universal appeal made to us simultaneously by all Nature, from the depths of Earth and Sea, fr

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[17]

I. THE LIVING INFINITE. We have followed the Bird in all its liberties of flight, and space, and light; but the Earth which we quitted would not quit us. The sweet melodies of the winged world could not prevent us from hearing the murmur of an infinite world of shadow and silence, which, wanting the speech of man, expresses itself, nevertheless, with eloquent force, by means of a myriad mute tongues. A universal appeal made to us simultaneously by all Nature, from the depths of Earth and Sea, fr

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[18]

An appeal which becomes frightful from the number of those who make it. What is the little tribe of Birds, or that of Quadrupeds, compared with them? All the animal species, all the various forms of life, brought face to face with this one family, disappear, and are as nothing. Put the world on one side, and on the other the Insect World; the latter has the advantage. Our collections contain about one hundred thousand species. But taking into consideration that every plant at the least nourishes

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[19]

Having arrived at this point, we think our review is ended. Patience! The molluscs, which in the Southern Seas have created so many islands,—which literally pave, as recent soundings have shown, the twelve hundred leagues of Ocean separating us from America,—these molluscs are qualified by many naturalists with the name of embryo insects ; so that their fertile tribes form, as it were, a dependency of the higher race,—candidates, one might say, for the rank of Insect. This is sublime. The reason

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[20]

It escapes us; Nature has created for it, with respect to man, a perpetual alibi . If she reveals it to us for a moment in a single gleam of love, she hides it for years in the depths of the shadowy earth or in the discreet bosom of the oaks. And even when discovered, captured, opened, dissected, and examined by a microscope in every detail, it still remains to us an enigma. And an enigma of by no means reassuring character,—whose singularity almost scandalizes, while it so confuses our ideas. W

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[21]

The Insect, nevertheless, does not look upon itself as vanquished. To the systems of the philosopher and the terror of the child (which are, perhaps, both the same thing), this is its answer:— In the first place, that Justice is universal, that size has nothing to do with Right; that if one could suppose the Right to be unequal in its application, and the Universal Love to incline the balance, it would be on the side of the little. It says that it would be absurd to judge by the figure, to conde

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[22]

I admit that this weighty plea has made an impression on me. If thou toilest and lovest, O Insect, whatever may be thy aspect, I cannot separate myself from thee. We are truly somewhat akin. For what am I myself, but a worker? What has been my greatest happiness in this world? Our communion of action and destiny will open my heart, and give me a new sense with which to understand thy silence. Love—the divine force which circulates in all things, like an universal soul—is the interpreter through

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[23]

II. OUR STUDIES AT PARIS AND IN SWITZERLAND. In the prolonged perusal of naturalists and travellers by which we prepared ourselves for writing "The Bird," and for which nothing less was required than the patience of a solitary woman, we gathered on the way a number of facts and details which presented the Insect to our eyes under the most varied aspects. The Insect appeared to us incessantly in company with the Bird,—here like a harmony, there as an antagonism,—but too often in profile, and as a

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[24]

Feminine qualities are specially needful in microscopical studies. To succeed in these, one must become somewhat of a woman. The microscope is amusing at a first hasty glance; but if one would make a serious use of it, it demands a certain amount of dexterity, patient tact, and especially leisure,—considerable leisure,—full liberty of time,—in order that one may indefinitely repeat the same observations, and examine the same object on different days, in the pure light of morning, in the warm ray

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[25]

I was not released from my absorption in that terrible sixteenth century until the spring of 1856. "The Bird" had also made its appearance. I sought an interval of rest, and established myself at Montreux, near Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. But this most delightful locality, awakening in me a keen perception of Nature, did not restore my tranquillity. I was still too much affected by the bloody story I had been narrating. A flame burned within me which nothing could extinguish. I rambled along

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[26]

The country is very beautiful and very fresh in July, but frequently, in September, is already cold. You perceive above and behind you, at an enormous elevation, an ocean of water suspended. This is the main reservoir whence issue the great European reservoirs; the mass of St. Gothard, a table-land measuring ten leagues in every direction, which from one extremity pours out the Rhine, from another the Rhone, from a third the Reuss, and towards the south the Ticino. You do not see this reservoir—

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[27]

I began to feel less athirst. In the middle of summer the nights were cold, the mornings and evenings fresh. Those spotless snows, which I gazed at so eagerly and with insatiable eyes, purified me, it seemed, from the long, dusty, sun-burned, blood-besprinkled, and sublime, but also sometimes miry, revolutions of history. I recovered a little my equilibrium between the drama of the world and the eternal epopea. What can be more divine than these Alps? Elsewhere I have called them "the common alt

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[28]

They face, they explain one another, harmonize with and love one another. But in what austerity! In their mutual love we recognize an identity of the strongest contrasts,—fixity and fluidity, rapidity and eternity, the snows above the verdure, forebodings of winter in summer. Hence results a prudent nature, a general sagacity in the things themselves. One enjoys without forgetting that one's enjoyment will not be of long duration. But the heart is not the less moved by a world of such seriousnes

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[29]

Such, at the first glance, is the customary effect of the woods. But at the second all is changed. The suffocation, or at least subordination, imposed by the fir upon all those plants which would fain grow in its shade, lets light into the depths; and when the eyes have become accustomed to this kind of gloaming, we see considerably further, and distinguish much more clearly, than in the inextricable labyrinth of ordinary forests where everything acts as an obstruction. The spectacle first prese

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[30]

In the very localities least frequented by the wasps, light, hoarse, internal rustlings seemed to issue from the trees. Were these the voices of their genii, their Dryads? No, indeed; but of their mysterious enemies, the mighty populace of the shadows, which, following up the veins of the trunk and penetrating its entire extent, work out for themselves, with patient teeth, innumerable ways and channels and galleries. Sometimes nearly a hundred thousand scolyti [B] (for such is their name) are fo

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[31]

In that silence which was not silence, a something—I know not what—assured us that the dead forest was in truth alive, and on the point of breaking forth into speech. We entered it full of hope, and believing that we should discover some secret. We felt certain that to our inquiring spirit a great manifold Spirit was about to reply. Though fatigued by the walk, and in an infirm state of health, I felt great pleasure in the search I had undertaken in these pallid glooms. I loved to see before me

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[32]

The coup de théâtre was violent, and the immense swarming had its effect. A vivid and unwonted joy agitated the much-moved hand that had made the happy discovery; and in proportion to the full revelation of its greatness, a wild vertigo passed from the distracted people to the author of this great ruin. The walls of the city fell down, and revealed the interior of the edifice; innumerable halls and galleries were laid bare; generally four to five inches in length, and about half an inch in heigh

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[33]

It is this acid also which, undoubtedly, had accelerated and assisted the enormous and colossal labour, had opened the way to the tiny efforts of those indefatigable sculptors whose chisels are their teeth. Yet even in this case there can be no question but that it must have occupied a considerable time. Successive generations had very probably passed their lives in the tree, working always on the same plan and in the same direction. The image of the projected and longed-for city—the hope of cre

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[34]

Alas, I am much afraid that the sanguine dream is ended! It is not that a child's stick, held by a young and womanly hand, has penetrated to the very bottom of the structure carried so deeply into the earth; but that the exterior defences, which protected and closed up the whole, and kept off the rains, have been removed and scattered abroad. And lo! the great autumnal floods pouring down from the Rhigi, Mont Pilate, and the St. Gothard, the father of rivers,—floating above the forests in heavy

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[35]

My wife and I returned home dreaming, and understanding one another without speaking. What had previously been an amusement, a curiosity, and a study, thenceforth became a Book....

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[36]

III. OUR STUDIES AT FONTAINEBLEAU. I feel no surprise that our great initiator into the Insect World, Swammerdam, recoiled in affright when the microscope first afforded him a glimpse of it. For the name of its inhabitants is, the Living Infinite. Upwards of two hundred years men have laboured, simplifying in one direction, and complicating in another. The excellent treatises written upon this subject leave, among a multitude of partial illuminations, a certain feeling of being dazzled. Such is

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[37]

The place admirably favoured the then condition of my soul. All the painful circumstances of the time, by driving me back upon myself, increased my concentration. We constituted for ourselves a perfect solitude. Our chamber became for us an entire city. And outside there was nothing but a ring of wood, then tolerably small, which we traversed on foot. This ring oppressed me a little in the great heats, when the sun shone reflected on the sandstone. But in these dry hot days the thought does not

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[38]

All that Sénancour says of Fontainebleau is true so far as relates to the vague dreamer who brings with him no prevailing thought. Yes; the landscape "is generally on a small scale, dull, low, and solitary without being wild." Animals are seldom met with, except in a few kids whose number is easily counted. Birds are not numerous. Few or no springs are visible; and the apparent absence of water has a specially depressing effect on the Alpine traveller, who still recalls the freshness of the innu

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[41]

Observe that wherever the forest assumes an aspect of grandeur, either through the extent of its vista or the loftiness of its trees, it resembles all other forests. The truly magnificent towering beeches of Bas-Bréau seem to me, in spite of their stately bearing and smooth shining bark, a thing I have seen elsewhere. The place is original only where it is low, gloomy rock; where it bears evidence of the struggle of the sandstone, the twisted tree, the perseverance of the elm, or the courageous

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[42]

Some one has said to me: "Is she not the Viola of Shakespeare, with her dubious but always charming aspect; now a maiden, and now a cavalier? Or his young page, Rosalind, after she appears as a laughing damsel?" No: the contrasts are much greater. For the fairy here has countless faces. She has the cold Alpine plants, and yet she shelters the most delicate flora. Austere in winter and spring, she terrifies you with the rugged rocks which, in autumn, she conceals under a crimson mantle of foliage

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[43]

Does not our forest deserve the name of the Shakespearian comedy, "As You Like It"? No; to deal justly with it, we must own that its entertaining metamorphosis, and all its changes to the eye, are absolutely external. Movable in its leaves and mists, fugitive in its shifting sands, it has a firmer foundation than perhaps any other forest, and a power of fixity which communicates itself to the soul, and invites it to grow strong; to search out and seek within its own nature whatever it possesses

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[44]

Its beauty is that of the profound, faithful, and tender heart, which does not the less vary its exquisite grace, though it may daily repeat the words of Charles d'Orléans: "Who can ever weary of her? Still her beauty she renews." These ideas occurred to me one day as, seated upon Mont Ussy, I looked across Fontainebleau. I comprehended how, in this confined and ordinary region—in this apparent chaos of rocks, and trees, and sandstone—prevailed a tolerable degree of order, which necessarily conc

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[45]

Dig, and you shall find. There lies the charm, the vitality of the genius loci . The word "genius" conveys too great an idea of fixity, and that of "fairy" is more appropriate. Who shall describe the mystery of this profound hidden basin? this simple and attractive delusion, which, while promising only dryness, faithfully stores up underneath the treasure of its waters? An eminent Italian artist has given expression to it in the paintings which adorn the Hall of Henry II. It is the Nemorosa , th

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[46]

IV. OUR STUDIES AT FONTAINEBLEAU. ( Continued. ) Even in its hours of silence, the forest occasionally finds a voice, a sound, or a murmur, which recalls to you the remembrance of life. Sometimes the laborious woodpecker, laboriously toiling at its task of excavating the oak, cheers itself with its singular cry. Frequently the heavy hammer of the quarryman, falling and falling on the sandstone, resounds in the distance with a hoarse, dull echo. And finally, if you listen attentively, you catch a

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[47]

It is an admirable place to cure you of the great malady of the day—its shiftiness, its empty agitation. The time does not know its own disease; men say that they are clogged and cloyed, when they have scarcely skimmed the surface. They set out with the delusive notion that the best of everything is superficial and external, and that it is sufficient to put their lips to the cup. But the surface is frequently froth. Lower down, and within, lies the elixir of life. We must penetrate deeper, and m

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[49]

All the life of the forest centres in the quarrymen and the ants. Formerly it had the bees also. They were very numerous, and may still be met with in the direction of Franchart. But they have greatly decreased in numbers since the planting of so many pines and Northern trees, which kill everything with their shade, and in many places have exterminated the heather and the flowers. On the other hand, the yellow ants, which prefer for their materials the prickles and catkins of the pines, appear t

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[50]

The ants teach us a similar lesson of patience. The breeders of birds and game incessantly damage, overthrow, and carry away the immense works which have occupied them for a whole season. Incessantly they begin them anew with heroic ardour. We constantly paid them a visit, and learned to sympathize with them more and more. Their patient procedures, their active and concentrated life, is, in truth, more like that of the artisan than the winged existence of the bird which formerly occupied our att

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[51]

Nothing aroused in my mind a greater number of dreams, no spectacle threw me back more directly upon myself. For I, too, through some degree of poverty or sluggishness, I have long been rebellious like this sandstone, upon which, frequently, nothing can make an impression, or which, splitting cross-wise, yields but irregular, shapeless fragments and useless refuse. It needed History, with its weighty iron hammer, to disengage me from myself, to separate me from my own obstacles, to shatter and r

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[52]

Thus, then, observe the rough quarry, bristling with the débris of ages, which grows green, once more reproduces, and attires itself in a garb of such foliage as it never knew before man applied the iron to it. "A wild winter vegetation! Black firs! Melancholy birch-trees!" But with all the gloominess mingles the white hawthorn blossom. What I have so eagerly craved, and yearned for, in my long years of silence, when I was as an arid block and a man of stone, was the fluid nature of the sap and

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[57]

CHAPTER I. TERROR AND REPUGNANCE OF CHILDHOOD. [F] [F] This fragment of a domestic journal was originally intended for insertion in "The Bird." [It is from the pen of Madame Michelet.] "Winter, summer, and nearly all the fine days of the year, had passed since the departure of my father for Louisiana, from which he was not fated to return. Our country-house had remained deserted. My mother, full of sad presentiments, and fearing herself to revisit it, sent me there, one afternoon, with my brothe

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[58]

"Deeply agitated, I crossed the approach to the domain, and with a spring arrived opposite the door which my father had so often opened with that ineffable smile I still can see. "A child, and yet already a young girl, at that age of the imagination when dreams are so powerful, I opposed the obstinate need of my heart to the certain fact. I waited a moment on the threshold with a strange anxiety; the strength of my faith woul fain have conquered the sad reality. But the door remained closed. "Th

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[61]

"I had never before been brought in contact with a world like this. My father's vigilance, and still more successfully, the assistance of the little birds, had preserved us from it. So, in my experience, and with a heart overcome by the spectacle of so much ruin, I cursed those whom one ought not to curse, because all creatures are from God. "Later in life, but much later, I understood the designs of Providence. When man is absent the insect ought to take his place, so that everything may pass t

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[62]

For the rest, Nature is so far from sharing our prejudices, dislikes, and childish apprehensions, that she seems specially to care for and protect the gnawing species which injuriously interfere with the economy of our small farms and plantations, but which, on the other hand, lend valuable assistance in maintaining the balance of species and keeping down the vegetable accumulation of certain climates. She preserves with watchful anxiety the caterpillars which we destroy. In the case of the oak-

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[67]

CHAPTER II. COMPASSION. One day, into the studio of the painter Gros entered a pupil of his, a handsome and careless young man, who had thought it clever to pin to his hat a beautiful butterfly, which, having just been captured, was still struggling painfully. The artist, indignant, broke out into a violent passion. "What, wretch!" he cried, "is this your feeling for the Beautiful? You find an exquisite creature, and can make no better use of it than to crucify and kill it barbarously! Begone, b

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[68]

This speech will not surprise those who are acquainted with the great master's vivid sensibility, and his reverence for the Beautiful. What is more astonishing is that an anatomist, a man living with the scalpel always in his hand—Lyonnet—should speak in the same sense, and so speak in reference to insects which are to ordinary observers the least interesting. That able and patient man has opened up, as we know, an entirely new channel for science by his colossal investigation of the willow-grub

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[70]

While revolving all these thoughts, I glanced occasionally from my bed towards the window, and watched if the drone did not stir a little, if he were really dead. Unhappily he gave not a sign: his immobility was complete. This lasted for half-an-hour, or about three-quarters; then suddenly—without, so far as I could see, the slightest preliminary movement—my drone arose with a strong and steady flight, and without the slightest hesitancy, as if nothing had befallen him. He passed out into the ga

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[71]

It matters not; for who shall rightly determine what is really great or little? Everything is great, everything important, everything equal in the bosom of nature and the impartiality of universal love. And where is it more perceptible than in the infinite travail of the little organic world on which our eyes were fixed? To lift them towards the mountains, or lower them towards the insects, was one and the same thing. EXTRACT FROM MADAME MICHELET'S JOURNAL. "On the 20th of July, a very hot day,

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[72]

"I frequently resorted thither, ascending the first slope of the mountain, solitary, and enriched with flowers. I took with me a book, and yet I never read. The prospect was too absorbing. Whether the eye ranged afar over the level mirror of the lake, and the rocks of Meillerie, with their forests, meadows, and precipices; or hovered close at hand about the nest of Clarens and the low towers of Chillon; or, finally, returned to the pretty villas, with their green lattices, of our friends the phy

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[73]

"On this day, then, the 20th of July, allowing my glance to fall mechanically at my feet, and withdrawing my eyes for a moment from the too luminous picture, I saw with astonishment a scene which vividly contrasted with this attractive and holy spot,—an atrocious warlike struggle. The insect-giant which we call the stag-beetle, one of the largest of European species, a black shining mass, whose horns bristle with superb crescent-wise pincers, had seized upon a beetle of far inferior size. Nevert

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[74]

It afflicted us greatly; we attempted to shorten it by the help of the ether, and to separate this Juliet from her Romeo. But the indomitable male laughed at all our poisons, and dismally dragged himself along. We shut him up in a large box, where he did not die until after a considerable period, and incredibly large doses. His punishment—and, reader, you may justly call it ours —endured for fully fifteen days. This robust, enduring being, with his inextinguishable flame of life, threw us into a

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[79]

CHAPTER III. WORLD-BUILDERS. There is a world under this world, above, below, and all around it, of which we have no suspicion. Occasionally, indeed, we catch a faint murmur, a sound, and thereupon we say, "It is a trifle, it is nothing." But this nothing is the Infinite. The Infinite of the invisible life, the silent life, the world of night and of the inner earth, of the shadowy ocean,—the unseen creatures of the air which we breathe, or which, mingling in the fluids we drink, circulate within

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[80]

It is impossible to speak of insects or molluscs without naming these animalcules, which seem to be their rough outline, and in the extreme simplicity of their organism already foretoken, indicate, and prepare for them. With a good microscope you can discern these miniatures of the insect, which simulate their organism, and mimic their movements. When you are able to distinguish the Rotifers , you think that in the aggregations and in the tentacles of their mouth you recognize them as little pol

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[81]

A bygone world, hidden beneath the present and upper world in the profundities of life or the obscurity of time! What might it not tell us, if God would give it speech, and permit it to recall all that it has done or is doing for us! What just demands might not the elementary plants, the imperfect animals whose dust has fashioned for our use the fertile crust of the globe, that noble theatre of life, address to us! "While you were still asleep," might say the ferns, "we alone, by transforming an

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[82]

The labours of the unseen architects of the globe, admired by our men of science in extinct species, travellers have discovered revived in living species. They have surprised, in our own day, immense laboratories in permanent activity, of beings invisible in themselves, or apparently powerless, but really of boundless capacity of toil, if we judge by its results. What death accomplishes for life, life itself relates. Numbers of tiny organisms become by their present works the interpreters and hi

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[83]

But it is more particularly in the vast Southern Ocean that these works are prosecuted on a grand scale by the polypes of the lime, the corallines, and madrepores of every kind; an animal vegetation worthy of comparison with the labour of the mosses in a peat-moor, which continue to flourish in their upper growth while the lower are transformed and decomposed. Exactly like these vegetables, the polypes, and even their production, the coral, while still soft and tender, frequently become the nour

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[84]

On the margin of these islands,—which are generally circular, like a ring,—accumulates a layer of vegetable wealth, which speedily grows green, and embellishes itself with the only tree that can endure salt-water, the cocoa-nut palm. This, then, is the humus ; the life which will for ever continue to develop. The fresh springs and fountains will next make their appearance, invited and fed by the vegetation. Such is the original type of a young world which in due time will be inhabited. The cocoa

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[89]

CHAPTER IV. LOVE AND DEATH. Above the infinite elementary life,—that quasi-vegetable life in which generation is but, as it were, a-budding,—begins the distinct, individual, and complete organism whose strongly centralized electric network of nerves is able to sympathize directly with the rapid energy of its acts and resolutions. However humble the insect may seem in appearance, it is from the first independent of the immovable, expectant existence of all the inferior races. It is born entirely

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[90]

No other being, as we shall prove, exercises so great an influence upon our globe; no other throws itself into the condition of general existence with so vital an energy. But this extraordinary strength, in such disproportion to the size, bulk, and weight of the insect, is subject to a severe law; the rapid, absolute, and complete renewal, at each generation, of the individual. Love implies death. To engender and to beget is to die. He who is born, by the very act of his birth kills. This is a s

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[91]

It is needful for the due development of the child that its mother should provide it with a triple or quadruple cradle, and there deposit it; not neglected, and without succour, but furnished with its first aliment—an aliment light and fitted for its feebleness, which it can find on its waking up into life. This done, she closes the door, seals it, and voluntarily excludes and interdicts herself from returning thither. Thenceforth she must cede her rights to the universal mother, who shall repla

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[92]

That in such a cradle the child should live commodiously,—that from its own body it should draw out a silky covering to line its plastic prison,—that finally, when sufficiently strong, it should issue forth under the influence of the heat,—this is self-explanatory, and we admire without being astonished. But what really excites our wonder is, that the mother,—a butterfly, or perhaps a beetle,—after the numerous changes through which she has passed, after her numerous sloughings, transitory slumb

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[93]

A curious book has been written on the mechanism and infinitely varied instrumentation with which insects are provided for the discharge of the maternal duty. Their implements are often charming from their precision, delicacy, and subtlety. It will suffice to particularize that of the rose-bush aphis,—so well described by Réaumur, as a saw whose two blades act in an inverse direction, and whose teeth are each a set of teeth. O unheard-of power of Love! Whether this divine workman prepares for th

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[94]

For three days she worked with undiminished ardour. There were no signs that she took the least food: constantly at her work, she appeared to have already abandoned all care for her own life. Her preoccupation was so great and her activity so eager that we were able to approach her very closely. Nothing frightened her; so that we could establish ourselves at our ease near her little nest, and observe her with as much patience as she herself brought to her work. On the fourth morning we found the

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[95]

We shall enjoy the satisfaction of seeing them weave their winter shelter. It will be pleasanter for them under our roof than at the bottom of the vase. The mother's intentions will be carefully carried out. Adopted, tended, and removed to Paris, the nymphs of Fontainebleau will take, one fine morning in spring, their flight above our windows, and, as young bees, will be able to gather, if not the honey of the heather, at least that of the Luxembourg....

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[99]

CHAPTER V. THE ORPHAN: ITS FEEBLENESS. [H] [H] La Frileuse ,—literally, "The chilly one." We have told the easiest and pleasantest story to relate, the story of the privileged creature for whom its mother has duly provided, and who is nourished and clothed by her efforts. But many—in truth, the greatest number—enter life destitute and necessitous. They fall naked into the great world. Poverty the audacious, necessity the ingenious, the severe internal travail of hunger and desire, stimulate and

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[100]

Behind this active apparatus he detected on the sides of the body a passive apparatus, a series of tiny mouths or valves (the stigmata ) which await the air, and open to receive it. Ingenious precautions! The orphan born completely naked, and launched into life unprotected to undergo the most toilsome metamorphoses, is rendered competent for the task only by eating greedily from the moment of its birth, absorbing and devouring! It must eat always and everywhere, even in the least respirable atmo

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[101]

This fact the moderns have recognized,— the insect is an embryo . But who would suppose that this very circumstance would doom it to death? How rude a contradiction! An embryo launched into the thick of the fray, to be the victim of all—of birds, and even of insects. An embryo armed, it is true; and nothing is stranger than to see the soft grubs brandishing their threatening jaws, while their feeble body, deprived of all defence, is exposed on every side. Flight offers them but few chances; thei

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[102]

Some of our readers, always well clothed and warmed, will say, I am sure, that cold is an excellent thing, which stimulates the appetite and strengthens the frame. But those who have been poor will very well understand my preceding observations. For my part, recollections of my childhood convince me that cold is, in all truth, a punishment; you cannot get accustomed to it; its prolongation does not render its effect less severe. How keen a joy I felt (in rigorous winters) at each thaw which rele

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[103]

Those who on their birth come in contact with chill green leaves, and their lustrous glaze, are still more industrious. They practise arts which astonish the observer. Some raise enormous masses with imperceptible cables, and by mechanical processes analogous to those which were employed in removing and rearing the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. Others cut out figures purposedly irregular, which the seam afterwards fits into its harmonious ensemble . Every industrial corporation may be fou

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[104]

The existence of these poor motherless creatures is divided between two severe conditions: toil, and growth through disease. For their moultings, or sloughings, are, in effect, a disease. The painful moment having arrived for the little creature to change its clothing, a clothing which clings to its flesh, it is seized with illness, abandons its leaf, and creeps languidly to some solitary asylum. If you saw it in such a soft, inert, and withered condition, so different from its natural state, yo

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[105]

What! A mask! and yet it wills and toils, strives and suffers, and sometimes seems more advanced than will be the being produced from it! So much industry and skill imprisoned in a skin which will immediately dry up and be blown away by the breeze! However this may be, it is seized one morning by an undefinable kind of irritability and disquiet,—by a mysterious impulse which excites it to undertake a new task. You would say that within itself another self exists, moving, and stirring, and follow

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[109]

CHAPTER VI. THE MUMMY, NYMPH, OR CHRYSALIS. Let us respect the childhood of the world. Let us pardon the early ages for the consolations and hopes which they drew from the strange drama represented by the Insect, the thoughts of immortality which grave Egypt founded upon it. This drama tranquillized more hearts and wiped away more tears than all the mysteries of Canopus or the revels of Eleusis. When the mourning widow, the eternal Isis, ever reproducing herself in eternal anguish, was snatched

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[110]

Where was it? In the foul shadow, in night and death. A deity has summoned it forth, and will yet do much more for this beloved soul! Sweet, tender ray! The hope was surely founded upon justice, on the impartial love of the Creator of all life. Accordingly, the widow draws from its death the brilliant pledge of the future, and gives utterance to this woman's cry:—"Merciful Heaven! do for my husband and for me what thou hast done for the insect. Do not grant less to man; do not grant to my best-b

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[111]

All this seems clear, does it not? The ancient mystery has perished? Man has discovered, in its fulness, the secret of things? Réaumur does not think so; Réaumur himself, who has guided us so far. In recording his observations he does not appear satisfied, and confesses "that they still leave very much to be desired." [I] [I] Réaumur, "Histoire des Insectes," tome i., p. 351. In truth, it is a thing to confound and almost to terrify the imagination, to think that a grub, at the outset no bigger

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[112]

This little body, when it has thus escaped from its long heavy mask (living, nevertheless, but a moment since, a life full of energy), will dangle, and grow dry, and skilfully ascend to its silken fastening. There it prepares to fix itself in its new "Me" as a nymph, while its former "Me," tossed about by the wind, is speedily driven I know not whither. All is, and ought to be, changed. The legs will not again be the legs. It will need lighter organs. What can the child of the air, which can bal

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[113]

This is grand and magnificent,—no spectacle is grander! For life at such a point to change, to dominate over the organs, to rise victorious, so entirely free of the ancient Ego ! To those who have revealed to us such a prodigy of transfiguration, from the bottom of my heart I say, "Thanks!" How marvellous the security in this being which abandons everything, which unhesitatingly dismisses its strong and solid existence, the complicated organism which just now was itself , its own individuality!

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[114]

Admirable compensation! When penetrating so deep down into life, I expected to encounter certain physical fatalities. And I found justice, immortality, and hope. Yes, antiquity was right, and modern science is right. It is death, and yet it is not death; let us call it if you will partial death. Is death ever otherwise? Is it not a new birth? Throughout my life I have remarked that each day I died and was born again; I have undergone many painful strugglings and laborious transformations. One mo

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[115]

An ingenious philosopher has remarked that if the human embryo, while imprisoned in the maternal bosom, might reason, it would say:—"I see myself endowed with organs of which here I can make no use,—limbs which do not move, a stomach and teeth which do not eat. Patience! these organs convince me that nature calls me elsewhere; a time will come when I shall have another residence, a life in which all these implements will find employment. They are standing still, they are waiting. I am but the ch

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[119]

CHAPTER VII. THE PHŒNIX. The drama is complete. From the gray or blackish mummy which just now lay before you dried and shrivelled, you see the new creature, the resuscitated, the phœnix, blithely escaping, to shine resplendent in all the glory of youth. The very reverse of our destiny: commencing with bright and butterfly days, in later life we crawl and languish; while the insect commences with years of gloom, and from a long life of obscurity emerges into the youth in which it dies glorified.

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[120]

Some species—as, for example, the ants—experience so great a difficulty, that the captive, probably, would never effect its release but for the opportune assistance of some power which, from without, hastens to extricate it, to deliver it (so to speak), and separate it from the trammels of its swaddling-clothes. Fortunate difficulty! which creates the bond between the two ages, attaches the liberator to the child she has delivered, and herself begins its education and society! But, for the major

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[121]

A frail aquatic insect, the gnat, on this important day assumes the daring mission of the navigator. It makes fresh use of its demitted envelope, and turns it into a bark. In this it stands upright, extends its new wings for sails, glides along the wave, and very frequently without shipwreck reaches the shore; where, when dried, the same wings will bear it off to the chase and the pursuit of pleasure. In an hour it appears a complete master of all these novel arts. It is the peculiarity of love

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[122]

Do not believe that these riches are simply the gifts of genial climates; that these glittering festal garments which they assume to love and die in are only the sheen of the sun, the all-powerful, decorator, which with its rays intensifies the enamel and gems we admire upon their wings. Another sun—a sun which shines for the whole earth, even for the ice-regions of the pole—profits them far more considerably. It exalts in them the inner life, evokes all their powers, and, on the given day, call

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[129]

CHAPTER I. SWAMMERDAM. What was known of the Infinite prior to 1600? Nothing whatever. Nothing of the infinitely great; nothing of the infinitely little. The celebrated page of Pascal, very frequently cited upon this subject, is the frank astonishment of a humanity so old and yet so young, which begins to be aware of its prodigious ignorance, opens its eyes to the Real, and awakens between two abysses. No one forgets that in 1610 Galileo, having received from Holland a magnifying lens, construct

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[130]

An astounding revolution! The abyss of life was unfolded in its profundity with myriads upon myriads of unknown beings and fantastic organizations of which men had not even dared to dream. But the most surprising circumstance is, that the very method of the sciences underwent a total change. Hitherto men had relied upon their senses. The severest observation invoked their testimony, and they thought that no appeal could lie from their judgment. But now behold experiment and the senses themselves

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[131]

His was a remarkable combination of mental endowments which, at the first glance, seem opposed to one another: a love of the great, and a taste for the subtlest researches; a sublimity of aim, and that obstinacy of analysis which would subdivide the atom, and yet never cry, "Hold, enough!" But, in reality, are these qualities of so contradictory a nature? By no means. Men whose hearts are filled with the love of Nature will declare that they harmonize admirably. Nothing great and nothing little.

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[132]

His sole recreation was to go in search of insects in the little soil which Holland offers above the waters. The melancholy meads, covered with Paul Potter's herds, possess, in the moist warmth of the summer, a great variety of animal life. The traveller is much impressed when he sees the crane, the stork, and the crow, elsewhere hostile, reconciled here by the abundance of their food, which they frequently hunt in company on terms of perfect accord. Hence the landscape acquires a peculiar charm

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[133]

A veritable creation! Look at the microscope. Is it a simple spy-glass? To the eyes which the instrument possessed, Swammerdam added two arms, one of which bears the glass and the other the object. He himself says, in reference to his more difficult investigations, "that he had attempted to obtain the assistance of another person, but that such assistance proved, in fact, an obstacle." It was for this reason that he organized a dumb man of copper, a discreet servant ready for every work; thanks

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[134]

His tender respect for Nature found its reward. While still a youth, and a simple student at Leyden University, he had two strong holds upon her in her highest and lowest manifestations. He was the first to see and understand the maternity of the insect and the human maternity. The latter subject, so delicate and yet so grand—in which he laboured conjointly with his master at Leyden—I put aside: let us dwell upon the former. He dissected and described the ovaries of the bee: found them in the pr

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[135]

He dared to say, and by the most delicate anatomy he demonstrated, that the larva, the pupa, and the butterfly represented three conditions of the same individual, three natural and legitimate evolutions of its life. How did learned Europe welcome this novel science of metamorphoses? That was the question. Swammerdam, young and without authority, without any position in the academy or university, lived in his cabinet. Scarcely anything of his works was published during his life, nor even fifty y

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[136]

A Frenchman rescued from the hands of the Inquisition the last manuscripts of Galileo. A Frenchman also—Thévenot—supported Swammerdam with his purse and credit. He was desirous of establishing him at Paris. On the other hand, the Grand-Duke of Tuscany invited him to Florence. But the fate of Galileo was too strong a warning. Even in France there was little safety. The mystic Morin was burned at Paris in 1664; the very year in which Molière performed the first acts of his "Tartuffe." Swammerdam,

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[137]

Misfortunes now accumulated upon his head. Poor and infirm, and dragging himself along the streets of Amsterdam with a large collection which he knew not where to store away, he received another terrible shock—the ruin of his country. The earth sunk under his feet. It was the fatal year of 1672, when Holland seemed crushed by the invasion of Louis XIV. Assuredly his fatherland had not spoiled Swammerdam; but nevertheless it was the native home of science, of free reason, the asylum of human thou

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[138]

The Ephemera is the fly which is born but to die, living a single hour of love. But Swammerdam did not enjoy that hour; and it seems as if he spent his too brief life in a state of complete isolation. At the age of thirty-six he was already drawing near his end. The depths of imagination and universal tenderness in his nature could not be alimented by the barren controversies of the age. In this condition there accidentally fell into his hand an unknown work,—a woman's book. This sweet voice spo

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[139]

All men now began to fathom, and incessantly toil in, that infinity which the hand of Swammerdam had opened up to them. From that time Europe laboured therein with diverse aims. Leuwenhoek, precipitating himself upon it, discovered and conquered new worlds. The Italian positivist, Malpighi, showed perhaps the highest boldness. He proved that the insect has a heart—a heart which beats like man's. One has not far to go to endow it also with a soul. Swammerdam, who was living then, was terrified by

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[143]

CHAPTER II. THE MICROSCOPE:—HAS THE INSECT A PHYSIOGNOMY? Armed with that sixth sense which man has achieved for himself, I can move forward, at pleasure, in any direction. It is in my power to track out, to reach, to compute the spheres, and gravitate with them in their vast orbits. But I feel much more strongly attracted towards the other abyss—that of the infinitely little. In its atoms I discover an intensity of energy which charms and astounds me. And I myself, what am I but an atom? Neithe

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[144]

Ay, fatally associated. And yet I cannot fly from them: swarms haunt the very air which I breathe,—what do I say? float in the fluids of my body. It is my interest to know them. But my sovereign interest is to escape from my deplorable and wretched ignorance, and not to quit this world until I have peered into the infinite. Full of such ideas, I addressed myself to one of the philosophers of the present day who have made the greatest and most successful use of the microscope,—the celebrated Dr.

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[145]

To the naked eye the former object seemed agreeable enough; the other, a tiny, obscure blade, of a dirty brown, and somewhat repulsive. In the microscope the effect was precisely the opposite. In the spider's foot, easily cleansed of a few downy spots, appeared a magnificent comb of the most beautiful shell, which, far from being dirty, by its extreme polish was rendered incapable of being soiled; everything glided off it. This object would seem to serve two ends: that of a very delicate hand, t

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[146]

But let us keep to our insects. Let us select the most miserable—the wonderfully little butterfly of the clothes-moth, that dirty white butterfly which seems the lowest of created beings. Take only his wing. Nay, far less, only a little dust, the light powder which covers his wing. You are astounded at seeing that Nature, exhausting the most ingenious industry in order that this offcast of creation may fly at his ease, and without fatigue, has scattered over his wing, not dust, but a multitude o

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[147]

I was but a child in this new study; that is, I was fresh to it, and curious. My special anxiety was to interrogate the countenance of the dumb little world, and to surprise there, in default of voice, the silent thought. Thought? At least, the dream, the obscure and floating instinct. I addressed myself to the ant; an humble being in form and colour, but endowed with a prodigious amount of social instinct and of the educational capacity; not to speak of its quickness of resource, of the prompti

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[148]

Not, however, without some difficulty. It was lively, alert, disquieted, and impatient to quit the table. I was looking at it in the middle of the sheet, when it was already nearly at the edge. I was obliged to etherize it a little, so as to stupefy it, and render it less uneasy. It appeared very clean, and highly varnished. Though a neuter, and not a female, its belly was rather large, and was joined to the chest by two small swellings. From the chest the head, which was strong and nearly round

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[149]

The perfect accord of every movement of the delicate and subtle tactile and telegraphic apparatus, the strong head, in fine, which seemingly thinks , completed the illusion. Its attitudes, its gropings, its efforts to obtain a knowledge of the situation, showed precisely what we should have been under similar circumstances. Shakespeare's Queen Mab, in her nut-shell chariot, occurred to my mind. And more, the chronicles of the Hubers; those impressive and almost terrifying narratives which would

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[150]

That which is most disconcerting, and gives it a peculiar appearance, are the teeth or mandibles placed outside the mouth, and springing, one on the right side, the other on the left, in a horizontal direction, so as to meet together: ours are vertical. These projecting teeth seem to offer battle, though, as I have said, they are also used for pacific purposes, and serve as hands . Behind the teeth may be seen several little threads or palpi at the entrance of the mouth; which are, in reality, t

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[151]

At that moment I felt that we were living in two worlds, and that there were no means of understanding each other. How could I reassure it? My language, that of the voice; its, that of the antennæ. Not one of my words could obtain access to the electric telegraph which served as its organ of hearing. The continuous bony case which envelops its body isolates the insect from us, and conceals us from the insect. It has a heart which beats like ours; but we cannot see its pulsations beneath its thic

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[155]

CHAPTER III. THE INSECT AS THE AGENT OF NATURE IN THE ACCELERATION OF DEATH AND LIFE. The insect has not my languages. He neither speaks by voice nor physiognomy. In what manner, then, does he express himself? He speaks by his energies. 1st. By the immense destructive influence he exercises on the superabundance of Nature, on a swarm of lingering or morbid lives which he hastens to sweep away. 2nd. He speaks also by his visible energies, especially in the moment of love, his colours, his fires,

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[156]

This is the subject of our second book. Let us first attack the point where he wounds us most, and seems the auxiliary of death: his immense, ardent, and indefatigable work of destruction. Let us contemplate him in history, and begin at the remotest epoch. In answer to our littlenesses, our disgusts, our terrors, to the narrow and egotistical judgments which we bring to bear upon such subjects, we must recall the great and necessary reactions of Nature. It has not advanced with the order of a co

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[157]

Ye men of this lingering epoch,—sons of the lean and sober West—brought up in the little, close, carefully tended, pared, and picked gardens, which you call "wide cultivation,"—enlarge, I pray you, your conceptions; extend them, and endeavour to imagine something greater than these petty corners, if you would comprehend anything of the earth's primitive forces; of the abundance and superabundance which she displayed when, soaked with warm mists, her bosom heaved with the glow of her first youth.

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[158]

To return to the primeval age. The most terrible destroyers, the most implacable assailants, which penetrated the lowermost rottenness of the great chaos, which at a higher level delivered the tree from the pressure of its parasites, and finally mounted to its branches, and brightened up the livid shadows,—these were the benefactors of species yet to come. Their uninterrupted work of unconquerable destruction reduced within reasonable limits the excess in which Nature was almost lost. They opene

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[159]

I know nothing upon earth which seems stronger, firmer, more durable, and more formidable than those miniature rhinoceros-like cuirassiers, which traverse earth as quickly as the great mammal traverses it heavily and slowly. The carabi, the galeritas, the stag-beetles, which carry with so much ease armour far more formidable than that of the Middle Ages, reassure us only by their size. Here strength is relatively formidable. Were a man proportionally strong, he might take in his arms the obelisk

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[160]

Is their work terminated? By no means. Immense zones remain in what may still be called an ancient condition, condemned to a terrible and unwholesome fecundity. In the centre of America the richest forests of the world seem ever to repel the approach of man, who enters them only to die. His arms, enfeebled by fever, have not even strength enough to collect their treasures. If a tree fall across his path, it becomes an insurmountable obstacle to the indifferent adventurer. He turns aside, and you

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[161]

Observe that the furious eagerness of the winged insects, which seem to be the agents of death, is frequently a cause of life. By an incessant persecution of the sick flocks, enfeebled by hot damp airs, they ensure their safety. Otherwise they would remain stupidly resigned, and hour after hour grow less capable of motion, gloomier and more morbid in the bonds of fever, until they could rise no more. The inexorable spur knows, however, the secret of putting them on their legs; though with trembl

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[162]

The great spiders of the Antilles, without piquing themselves on accomplishing a work of purification so terrible and so complete, labour nevertheless very industriously to secure the cleanliness of human habitations. They will not suffer any disgusting insect to exist. They are excellent servants—much cleaner than the slaves. Therefore men value them, and purchase them as indispensable domestics. Markets exist where spiders are regularly bought and sold. In Siberia, the spider enjoys the consid

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[165]

CHAPTER IV. THE INSECT AS MAN'S AUXILIARY. A hunter of small birds, in an ingenious academical memoir, gives utterance to the following paradox: "Their recent multiplication is the cause of the disease in the vine and the potato." How should this be? The disease, which first broke out in September 1845, is produced, says the author, by microscopic animalcules and parasitical vegetation previously destroyed by the insects. But these insect-protectors of agriculture perished, devoured by birds, in

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[166]

This hypothesis, supported with much wit and ability, and apparently grounded on facts and dates, rests wholly on one basis, and if it fails, crumbles to the ground. It supposes that the birds have been efficaciously protected by the law, and that, in twelve years, they have been so able to multiply as to become masters of the field, the tyrants and exterminators of the useful insect-species, and that, in fine, the latter have unfortunately almost disappeared. To this three replies may be given:

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[167]

Accordingly, the great labour of the bird against the insect precisely coincides with the labour of the husbandman. For the rest, we are far from saying, as the author referred to makes us say, that the bird is the sole purifier of creation. One must be blind, and indeed senseless, not to see that he shares this mission with the insect. The action, too, of the latter is undoubtedly more efficacious in the pursuit of a world of living atoms, which the insect, whose eyes are microscopes, detects a

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[168]

The carabi,—immense warrior-tribes armed to the very teeth, and displaying an ardent activity beneath their heavy coats of mail,—are the true guardians of your fields; and day and night, without holiday or repose, protect your crops. They themselves never touch the smallest blade or seed. Their sole occupation is to capture thieves, and they ask for no other reward than the thieves' bodies. Others toil underground. The innocent lobworm, which pierces and stirs up the soil, gets ready in a marvel

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[169]

It is evident that Nature's ideas are not the same as ours. She loads the most useful with rewards, whatever the nature of their work. For instance, the Geotrupes , which clears away the dung, is clothed in sapphire in payment of its service. The celebrated Coleopteron of Egypt, the sacred Ateuchus of the tombs, [J] appears glorified with an emerald aureola. [J] The Ateuchus sacer , or Sacred Scarabæus of the Egyptians. Who shall describe all the services rendered by these scavengers? Yet we are

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[170]

There could be no more useful task than to enlighten the peasant on the distinction that ought to be made between insects useful to agriculture and insects which are noxious; or those which may be turned to advantage in various sciences,—and especially in Chemistry,—which, it is probable, will yet discover unexpected resources in beings endowed with so copious and intense a vitality. In this respect, a very honourable work of initiation has been undertaken by the eminent naturalist who has so sk

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[171]

[L] The Goat-Moth Caterpillar. [M] The women of Egypt, it is said, eat the Blaps sulcata cooked with butter. "In Brazil, the Portuguese extracts from the Malalis of the bamboo, when the tree wears its nuptial flower, a kind of fresh butter for the table; and eats the ants in sweetmeats, at the moment that their wings uplift them on the breeze like an aspiration of love. "But generally the insect, apart from its real value, has been hunted by the peasants whose tillage it destroyed. It plundered

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[172]

He had foreseen such a moment; and having loaded his table with some of the insects most dreaded by agriculturists, he seized them, crunched them, and swallowed them gravely, with this strong speech, which will not be without fruit:—"They have eaten us: let us eat them!"...

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[175]

CHAPTER V. A PHANTASMAGORIA OF LIGHT AND COLOUR. If the insect does not and will not speak to us, are we to suppose that it does not express the burning intensity of the life within it? No living creature reveals itself more clearly; though only from itself to its kind, from insect to insect. They are bound up in themselves; are a sealed world, which has no outward expression, and no language except for its own members. For all ordinary purposes, an electric telegraph exists in their antennæ. Bu

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[176]

They lavish with royal magnificence their last days. And wherefore should they economize, when to-morrow they die? Break forth then, O life of splendour! Sparkle, ye gold and emeralds, and sapphires and rubies! And let that incandescent ardour, that torrent of existence, that cataract of profuse radiance, be poured out in one common, rapid flood! There is not space in our museums for the proper display of the prodigious, the unbounded variety of decoration with which Nature has, mother-like, sou

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[177]

It was as if they wished to say:— "We in ourselves are the whole of Nature. If she perishes, we shall enact a drama, and personate all her creations. For if you look for rich furry garb, behold us here in mantles such as a Russian czarina never wore. Do you wish for feathers? behold us radiant in plumage which the humming-bird cannot equal; or if you prefer leaves, we can imitate them so as to deceive your eye. Even wood—in fact, all kinds of substances—there is nothing which we cannot imitate.

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[178]

At evening, with the song of the grasshoppers, the croaking of the frogs, the shriek of the owls, and the lamentations of the vampires, mingles the howl of the apes; until a hiss, which seems drawn from a wounded bosom, silences all, and spreads a universal terror, because it indicates the presence of the sharp-clawed prowler, the swift jaguar. In these forests there is nothing to reassure you. Yonder green and peaceful waters, whence ever and anon proceeds the sound of half-choked sighs,—you pl

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[179]

The insects in fury and beauty are worthy of this scene. The exalted vitality, revealed among the gadflies and the mosquitoes, by their thirst of blood, is shown in other species by their enchanting colours, their caprices of design, their singularities of form, which either astonish us or terrify. The Buprestis imperialis , proud of its green cuirass powdered all over with dust of gold, seems to have passed through the bowels of the metalliferous earth, and enriched itself on the way. The Bupre

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[180]

Such, then, are the tongues of Love; for the boundless rainbow of all these colours is simply its varied expression. And for what purpose, if love itself ought to appear without an intermediary? Already, in our colder lands, the timid glow-worm, motionless under the hedgerow, suffers its little lamp to shine and guide through the night the lover to his love. In Italy it moves to and fro, and its flame has acquired wings. I was much struck by it, at the hot springs of Acqui, in Piedmont, where su

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[181]

In the tropical countries the stranger generally travels by night to avoid the heat. But he would not dare to enter the populous shadows of the forest-depths, were he not reassured by the luminous insects which he sees dancing and fluttering in the distance, and anon planted on the neighbouring bushes. He takes them for his companions, and fixes them in his shoes, partly to show him the path, and partly to keep off serpents. And when the morning breaks, he gratefully and carefully replaces them

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[182]

CHAPTER VI. THE SILKWORM. "The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"—said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),—"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realize

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[185]

CHAPTER VI. THE SILKWORM. "The ideal of the human arts of spinning and weaving,"—said to me one day a Southerner (a manufacturer, but a man of imagination),—"the ideal which we always follow is a woman's beautiful hair! Oh, how far are the softest wools or finest cotton from approaching it! At what an enormous distance does all, and ever will all, our progress leave us! We drag ourselves onward, a long, long way in the rear, and enviously regard that supreme perfection which Nature daily realize

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[186]

"The principal, the infinite effort of human industry, has combined all possible means for the improvement of cotton. Between the Vosges and the Rhine, the rare agreement of capital, machinery, the arts of design, and the chemical sciences, has produced those splendid Indian products of Alsace, to which England herself does honour by purchasing them. Alas! all this cannot disguise the original poverty of the ungrateful tissue which men have so richly embellished. If the woman who in her vanity c

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[187]

A mere glance at the silkworm convinces you that it is no more a native of Europe than any other sweet thing. All that is soft and exquisite springs from the East. Our West, that hardy soldier, blacksmith, and miner, is good only to dig. It is good mother Asia, disdained by her rude son, who has bestowed upon him the treasures which seem to concentrate the essence of the globe. With the Arab horse and the nightingale, she has given him coffee, and sugar, and silk,—the revivifiers of existence an

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[188]

It was to please her that Henry II. wore the first pair of silk stockings, and the fine silken close-fitting vest, which indicated all the gracefulness of a muscular yet slender figure. We know how ardent an enthusiasm Henry IV., at a later period, showed in promoting the growth of the silk-manufacture, planting mulberry-trees everywhere,—along the highways, in the market-places, in the courts of his palaces, and even in the gardens of the Tuileries. Coloured silks, for decoration and furniture,

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[189]

For silk is a noble and in nowise pretentious attire, which lends a subdued charm to the exuberant liveliness of youth, and clothes declining beauty with its most tender and touching radiance. A genuine mystery attends it which is not without attraction. Colour or gloss? Cotton has its peculiar gloss, and, when fitly prepared, often acquires an agreeable freshness. Silk is not properly glossy, but luminous,—with a soft electrical light, which harmonizes naturally with the electricity of the woma

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[193]

CHAPTER VII. INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT: AND ITS CHEMICAL ENERGIES, AS IN THE COCHINEAL AND THE CANTHARIDES. Have I insisted too much upon my theme? No; I have reached its very depths, its most important details. Silk is not a particular, but a general view or aspect of it, for nearly every insect produces silk. Hitherto we have dealt with only one kind of silk,—that of the bombyx, and indeed that of a species of bombyx which is not very fertile. Let us hope that the meritorious Society of Acclim

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[194]

Réaumur long ago asserted that numerous chrysalides would furnish a beautiful silk. The spider would yield a substance both delicate and tenacious,—as witness the admirable veil of spider's silk preserved in the Paris Museum. The delicate Arachne, whose light thread resembles a fleecy cloud,—which is nevertheless so strong, as it issues from the spinnerets,—Arachne is pre-eminently the spinner. But, as a general rule, the insect is the weaver, and wholly devoted to that feminine art. I was about

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[195]

We know that from the water-spider man derived the idea of the diving-bell; but it is not generally known that an ingenious Norman peasant has succeeded in imitating perfectly the operations of the larva of the syrphes, which, by means of an extremely prolonged respiratory apparatus, preserves a communication with the pure and wholesome air, even while working at the bottom of the most putrid waters. It seems, then, that in the Insect World exist a complete pharmacy, chemistry, and perfumery. Ha

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[196]

By a skilful mixture, we also obtain from the cochineal the pre-eminently gay and radiant colour, carmine, with its innumerable tints and rosy shades. A sovereign art with the insect is to carry on its sting, and concentrate at a particular point, the liquids which flow in the plant, in the living being. It is the very art of irritation. Its applications are innumerable in medicine and industry; tints, paintings, varied ornaments, a hundred fantastic and beautiful things come to us from the stin

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[201]

CHAPTER VIII. ON THE RENOVATION OF OUR ARTS BY THE STUDY OF THE INSECT. The Arts properly so called, the Fine Arts, should profit much more than the Industrial, by the study of insects. The goldsmith and the lapidary would do well to seek in them models and instruction. The soft insects, the flies, specially possess in their eyes truly magical irises, with which no casket of gems can bear comparison. In passing from one species to another, and even, if I mistake not, from one individual to anoth

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[202]

If you descend still lower, insects which do not live, like this fly, upon living but upon dead matter, ordure, and decomposition, astonish us by the richness of their reflections, which our enamel ought to endeavour to reproduce. The dunghill beetle, an ungainly black insect if we look only at the upper part of its body, is, underneath, of a deep sapphire-blue which no kingly diadem ever equalled! And what shall we say of the son of the dead, of the Egyptian scarabæus,—a living emerald, but far

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[203]

Perhaps it may next be an insect which neither by day nor night, neither to the naked eye nor under the microscope, could excite a feeling of interest; but if you take the trouble to lift up, with a delicate and patient scalpel, the laminæ which compose the thickness of its scaly wing, you will find there, in most instances, a variety of unexpected designs, sometimes vegetable curves,—sometimes airy ramifications,—sometimes angular striated figures, like hieroglyphics, which remind you of certai

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[204]

To return to the insects: beauty abounds in them both externally and internally. One need not search far in order to discover it. Take an insect, not very rare, which I constantly meet with on the sandy soil of Fontainebleau, in localities well open to the sun. Take—but not without precaution, for it is well armed—the brilliant cicindela. Even to the naked eye it is an agreeable object; but under the microscope it appears to be perhaps the richest and the most varied which art could study. These

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[205]

Frankly, is there aught approaching such a degree of excellence in our human arts? How great the necessity that, in their apparently fatigued and languid condition, they should gain life and strength from these living sources! In general, instead of going straight to Nature, to the inexhaustible fountain of beauty and invention, they have solicited help from the erudition, the history, and the antiquity of man. We have copied ancient jewels; sometimes those of the barbarous peoples which first p

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[206]

Gothic, so little in harmony with either our wants or our ideas, has passed out of our furniture, but it still lingers in the shawl-manufacture; a rich and costly industry, which, having once adopted the fantastic method of imitating in opaque wools those windows whose transparency was their special merit, can hardly emancipate itself from the bondage. Men have not consulted women. In order to weave complex designs, heap up a medley of arches and oriels, and condemn our wives to carry churches o

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[211]

CHAPTER IX. THE SPIDER—INDUSTRY—THE STOPPAGE. Before we pass on to those insect communities with which the latter portion of this volume will be occupied, let us speak here of a solitary individual. Higher, and yet lower, than the insect, the spider is separated from it by its organization, but connected with it by its instincts, wants, and food. A being strongly specialized in two particulars, it is excluded from the great classes of the animal kingdom, and stands isolated, as it were, in creat

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[212]

But this gregarious mode of living is wholly exceptional, confined to certain species, and peculiarly favoured climates. Everywhere else the spider, through its organism and the fatality of its life, assumes the character of the hunter, of the savage, who, living upon uncertain prey, remains envious, mistrustful, exclusive, and solitary. But remember that it does not resemble the ordinary hunter, who gets quit with his journeys, his exertions, and his activity. The spider's hunt costs it dearly,

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[213]

My first relations with the spider were nothing less than agreeable. In my poverty-blighted childhood, while I toiled alone (as I have said in my book on "The People") in the then ruinous and desolate printing-office of my father, the temporary workshop was in a kind of cellar, sufficiently well lighted,—being a cellar in the boulevard where my family resided, but on the ground-floor so far as concerned the adjoining street. Through a large grated window the mid-day sun obliquely lighted up the

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[214]

I was divided between two sentiments. I confess that I did not relish so close an intimacy,—the figure of such a friend pleased me but little; on the other hand, this prudent and observant being, which certainly did not lavish its confidence, seemed to say to me: "Wherefore should I not enjoy a little of thy sun? So different in nature, we have nevertheless arrived together from our necessitous toil and cold obscurity at this sweet banquet of light. Let us take heart, and fraternize. This ray wh

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[215]

Those which suspend their nests to the branches of trees, like those which suspend them to our windows, display an evident design to place themselves in the wind, where a current of air may waft the insects to them, or in the path of a ray of light in which the gnat may float and whirl. The web does not fall vertically, for such a position would restrict it to one current; the spider, like an able seaman, gives it a great obliquity, and thus secures a couple of currents, or even more. From the e

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[216]

This web, woven out of itself, living and vibrating, is much more than an instrument; it is a part of its being. Itself of a circular form, the spider seems to expand within this circle, and prolong the filaments of its nerves to the radiating threads which it weaves. In the centre of its web lies its greatest force for attack or defence. Out of that centre it is timid; a fly will make it recoil. The web is its electric telegraph, responding to the lightest touch, and revealing the presence of a

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[217]

Every animal lives by depredation. Nature is ever devouring itself; but the prey is not always sought and merited by a patient industry deserving of respect. No being, however, is so much the plaything of fate as the spider. Like every good workman, it has a twofold value: in its work and its person. An infinity of insects—the murderous carabus, or the libellula , an elegant and splendid assassin—have only their bodies and their weapons, and spend their lives joyously in killing. Others possess

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[218]

Even if she be not swallowed up herself, if the instrument of her trade is destroyed, the consequences are the same. Should the web be undone blow upon blow, a somewhat protracted fast renders it unable to secrete a fresh supply of thread, and it soon perishes of hunger. It is constantly confined in this vicious circle:— To spin, it requires food; To feed, it must spin. Its thread, for the spider as for the Parcæ, is that of destiny. We once made the experiment of removing three times running a

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[219]

I felt oppressed, and in the hope that the fresh air would perhaps revive it, I placed it on my window-sill; but it was no longer itself . I know not how the effect was produced; but it seemed to have melted away, and nothing of it remained but its skeleton. The vanished substance had left but its shadow, which the wind bore away to the neighbouring lake. CHAPTER X. THE HOME AND LOVES OF THE SPIDER. The spider greatly surpasses all other solitary-living insects. It not only possesses its nest, i

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[223]

CHAPTER X. THE HOME AND LOVES OF THE SPIDER. The spider greatly surpasses all other solitary-living insects. It not only possesses its nest, its ambush, its temporary hunting-station; it has (or, at least, certain species have) a regular house, a house of a very complex description: a vestibule, and a sleeping-chamber, and a mode of egress in the rear; and, finally, a door which is a very triumph of art, for it closes of itself, falling back by its own weight. The door! It is this which is wanti

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[224]

The ants have just reached the point at which most of our African tribes have halted. Every evening they shut up their dwelling-places with immense labour—renewed daily—and by a little, unsubstantial lattice-work, which does not relieve them from the necessity of planting sentinels. It is true, however, that these great, valiant, and well-armed peoples have no fear of invasion, and, like Lacedæmon, need neither walls nor ditches. Their proud intrepidity has set limits to their industry. On the o

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[225]

But the masterpiece of the genus is seen, especially in Corsica, in the laborious Mygale . Its residence is a kind of well, industriously walled round, with smooth and polished sides, and a double tapestry,—a coarse strong hanging on the earthward front, and a fine satiny hanging in the interior. The orifice of the well is closed by a door. This door is a disc, much larger at the top than at the bottom, and let into a groove in such a manner as to shut hermetically. The disc, which is not more t

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[226]

Its miserable condition of passive expectancy fully explains its character. To wait, while acting, running, fighting, is to cheat both time and hunger; but to remain there immovable, to be unable to stir from fear of alarming your prey, to watch it coming nearer and nearer but eventually escaping, and to suffer from an empty stomach! To be a witness of the endless, heedless dances of the fly, which, in the sunbeam, amuses and balances itself for hours without responding to the avid prayers of th

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[227]

Their nests are frequently masterpieces. At Interlaken, in Switzerland, I have admired their long soft tubes, warm in the interior, and well-lined,—externally, disguised with much skill by an artistic pell-mell of small bits of leaf, tiny twigs, and fragments of gray plaster, so as to melt perfectly into the colour of the wall supporting them. But this was nothing in comparison with a work of art which I have here at Fontainebleau. On the 22nd of July 1857, I discovered in an outhouse a very pre

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[228]

Alas, it is alone! Except a few species (mygales) in which the father renders some assistance to the mother, it expects no help. The male, after its moment of love, becomes, indeed, an enemy. Cruel consequences of misery! It perceives that its children are capable of furnishing it with food. But the mother, who is bigger than he, makes a similar reflection,—thinks that the eater is eatable,—and frequently crunches her spouse. These atrocious events never happen, I am confident, in climates where

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[229]

Have they any sympathies beyond their own race? So some authorities have asserted, and I believe it. They are isolated from us far less than the true insects. They live in our houses, have an interest in knowing us, and seem to observe us. They pay great attention to voices and sounds, and have a marvellous perception of them. If they have not the insect-organs of hearing (which would seem to be the antennæ), it is because they are all antennæ . Their excessive vigilance, and the nervous irradia

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[230]

Unfortunately the child had a stepmother, who, one day, introducing an amateur into the sanctuary, saw the sensible animal at its post. A blow from her slipper annihilated the auditory. The child fell swooning to the ground, was ill for three months, and died,—heartbroken!...

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[235]

CHAPTER I. THE CITY IN THE SHADOWS: THE TERMITES, OR WHITE ANTS. M. de Prefontaine (cited by Huber, in his work on "The Ants") relates that, when travelling in Guiana, he saw a party of negroes besieging certain fantastic edifices which he calls ant-hills. They did not venture to attack them except from a distance, and with firearms; having first taken the precaution, moreover, to dig a little trench and fill it with water, to check the progress of the beleaguered army and drown its battalions,

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[236]

Figure to yourself a mound of earth, about twelve feet high (some have been discovered measuring twenty), which, from a distance, might easily be mistaken for a negro's hut. Approach it, and you will at once detect that it is the product of a higher art. Its curious form is that of a pointed dome; or, if you like, of an obtuse and preponderating obelisk. For support, the dome or obelisk has four, five, or six cupolas from five to six feet high; and against these are propped up below some small b

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[237]

Observe that this dome is self-sustaining, and that its substructions, strictly speaking, would amply suffice for its support; the lateral pyramids being only its not indispensable auxiliaries. Here, then, we find the principle of a true, honest, and courageous art, which, relying on itself and its calculations, requires no assistance from external supports, and needs neither props nor buttresses. It is exactly the system of Brunelleschi. Who has carried the art to such a climax? We must own tha

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[238]

Various names have been bestowed upon them; among others, that of termites: and again, that of wood-ants,—a designation not very accurate, for the ants are their enemies, and their body, being exceedingly soft, is exactly the opposite of the dry hard body of the ant. They have been also called wood-lice; and they seem, in truth, a soft and feeble kind of vermin, which are crushed without resistance. Magnificent jest of God, who loves to exalt his humblest creatures! The Memphis, the Babylon, the

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[239]

If you still persist, if you penetrate, you admire the palace, its circuits, its corridors, its aërial bridges, the halls or saloons where the population lodge, the nurseries for the eggs, the caves, cellars, or magazines. But, above all, search to the centre. There lurks the mystery of this little world; there is its palladium, its idol, incessantly surrounded by the cares of an enthusiastic crowd. A strange and shocking object, which is not the less obeyed, and visibly adored! It is the queen,

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[240]

This soft and whitish-looking creature, a stomach rather than a being, is at least of the size of the human thumb: a traveller pretends to have seen one as large as a crab. The bigger she is, the more fertile, the more inexhaustible, this terrible mother of lice seems the more enthusiastically worshipped by her fanatical vermin. She appears to be their ideal, their poetry, their ecstasy. If you carry them off, with a fragment, a ruin of the city, you may see them, under a glass shade, instantly

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[245]

CHAPTER II. THE ANTS:—THEIR DOMESTIC ECONOMY—THEIR NUPTIALS. The ants enjoy a superiority over all other insects, inasmuch as they are less specialized by their mode of life, their nourishment, and the instruments of their industry. Generally, they adapt themselves to all conditions, and work in all climates; nor in all Nature do more energetic agents in purification and cleansing exist. They are, so to say, the factotums of Nature. The termites, at least the majority of them, work in the darkne

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[246]

The great ants of the South are much more savage than our European species; and feeling themselves sovereigns and mistresses, feared by all, dreading none, they march forward imperturbably, without suffering any obstacle to divert their course. If a house stand in their way, they enter, and all that is alive within it—even the enormous, venomous, and formidable spiders, ay, and small mammiferous animals also—is devoured. Men give place to them. And if you cannot quit your house, you have reason

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[247]

As for our European species, I cannot see that they do the slightest harm, either to man, or to the plants he cultivates. Far from it, they deliver him from an infinity of little insects. I have frequently seen long files of them, with each carrying in his mouth a very small grub as a contribution to the food stores of the republic. Such a picture should ensure them the benedictions of every honourable agriculturist. The mason-ants, which work in and entirely under the earth, are difficult to ob

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[248]

This scale of heat, extending over forty degrees, what is it but a thermometer? But more remains. The cares of alimentation, of what one might call "suckling," are much more complicated than among the bees. The eggs must receive a nourishing humidity from the mouth of the nurses. The larvæ take the beakful. And the young one which has worn through its husk and become a nymph, would not have strength enough to emerge from it if the attentive guardians were not at hand to open the husk, release th

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[251]

One day, however, I saw a young ant thrust forth its head, still somewhat pale, at a gate of the city, then step across the threshold, and march along the summit of the ant-hill. The escapade, however, was not long permitted. A nurse encountering the fugitive, seized it by the top of its head, and conducted it gently towards a neighbouring entrance. The child resisted; it suffered itself to be dragged along, and on the way coming in contact with a small piece of wood, profited by it to stiffen i

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[252]

To this lively gesticulation they join many other scarcely explicable movements,—such as cavalcades, in which they march mounted one upon another, exchanging gay defiances and light blows upon the cheeks. Then they rear themselves upright, and contend by couples, seizing upon a leg, a mandible, or an antenna. Naturalists have spoken of these as their pastimes, but I know not what to think. Among so busy, and obviously serious a family, this gymnastic exercise has perhaps a hygienic object which

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[253]

Numerous problems in statics and mechanics were solved by a felicitous audacity and with a great economy of effort. By degrees all was secured. The vast dome, embracing with a soft and delicate curve a great nation of workers in its lawful repose, offered nothing to the sight, neither door nor window, and appeared to be a simple heap of tiny fragments of fir. Do I mean that all slumbered in full confidence? It would be wrong to think so. A few sentinels wandered to and fro; at the lightest touch

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[254]

I watched it on one occasion, between six and seven o'clock in the evening. The day had been one of heavy showers and warm gleams of light. The horizon was lowering, and yet the air calm. It was Nature's pause before resuming her storms of rain. Upon a low sloping roof I saw descend quite a deluge of winged insects, which seemed stunned, confused, delirious. To describe their agitation, their disorderly movements, their somersaults and shocks to arrive more quickly at the goal, would be impossib

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[255]

It was an astonishing vision, a fantastic dream, which can never be forgotten. In the morning nothing remained as a memorial of the excesses of the preceding evening, except the fragments of some severed wings, in which no one could have divined the trace of a unique soirée d'amour . CHAPTER III. THE ANTS:—THEIR FLOCKS AND THEIR SLAVES. When I learned for the first time, from the pages of Huber, the strange and prodigious fact that certain ants keep slaves, I was greatly astonished—as everybody

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[259]

CHAPTER III. THE ANTS:—THEIR FLOCKS AND THEIR SLAVES. When I learned for the first time, from the pages of Huber, the strange and prodigious fact that certain ants keep slaves, I was greatly astonished—as everybody has been by this singular revelation—but I was especially saddened and wounded. What! I turn aside from the history of man in search of innocence. I hope at least to discover among the brute creation the even-handed justice of nature, the primitive rectitude of the plan of creation. I

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[260]

What a joy, what a triumph for the partisans of slavery, for all the friends of evil! Hell and tyranny, laugh ye, and make merry! A black spot is revealed in the brightness of Nature. I had flung aside Huber, and no book had ever seemed to me more hateful. Pardon, illustrious observer! your grandfather and your father had enraptured and charmed me. The first of the clan—Huber, the great historian of the bees—has inspired with new warmth the religion of man, and lifted up his heart. But Huber of

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[261]

It operates by a kind of titillation or gentle traction, such as we exercise upon the cow. These grubs, placed at the extreme limit of animal life—viviparous in summer, oviparous in autumn—are very humble creatures, and prodigiously inferior in intelligence to the ants. The magnifying-glass reveals them to the observer as always bent, and always engaged in feeding. Their attitude is that of the cattle. They are, in truth, the milch-cows of the ants; and that they may always profit by them, the l

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[262]

This strange fact, which ought apparently to change our ideas of animal morality, was discovered early in the present century. Pierre Huber, the son of the celebrated observer of the manners and habits of bees, walking one day in a field near Geneva, saw on the ground a strong detachment of reddish-coloured ants on the march, and bethought himself of following them. On the flanks of the column, as if to dress its ranks, a few speed to and fro in eager haste. After marching for about a quarter of

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[263]

The most curious circumstance is, that these civilized helots really love their great barbarous warriors, and carefully tend their children, gladly and cheerfully perform their tasks of servitude, and, more, encourage the extension of their slavery and the abduction of the little blacks. Does not all this wear the appearance of a free adhesion to the established order of things? And who knows but that the joy and pride of governing the strong and tyrannizing over their tyrants, may be for the li

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[264]

The observer then understood that with such a superiority of intelligence these helots might, in reality, wear the chains of servitude very lightly, and perhaps govern their masters. A persevering study proved to him that such was, indeed, the case. The little blacks in many things carry a moral authority whose signs are very visible; they do not, for example, permit the great red ants to go out alone on useless expeditions, and compel them to return into the city. Nor are they even at liberty t

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[265]

Suddenly the revolving mass seemed to sink and disappear. There was no sign of ant-hills in the turf; but after a while we detected an almost imperceptible orifice, through which we saw them vanish in less time than it takes me to write these words. We asked ourselves if it was an entrance to their domicile; if they had re-entered their city. In a minute at the utmost they gave us a reply, and showed us our mistake. They issued in a throng, each carrying a nymph on its mandibles. From the short

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[266]

Let us now endeavour to understand this shocking and hideous fact. It is peculiar to certain species; it is a particular incident, an exceptional case, yet related on the whole to a general law of the life of the ants. Their societies are founded on the principle of the division of labour , and the speciality of functions . The ant-hill, in its normal state, comprehends, as we know, three classes:— 1st. The great multitude, composed of laborious virgins, who confine themselves to the love of the

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[267]

M. Huber has discovered two species (the red-brown and red) who do not possess this essential class, this fundamental element of the ant communities. It would not surprise us if the accessory or warrior class were wanting. But here, in reality, it is the basis which we find deficient,—the vital foundation,—the raison d'être . We are, therefore, not so much astonished at the depraved resource by which these red ants subsist, as at the monstrous lacuna which compels them to adopt it. There is a my

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[268]

Singular triumph of intelligence! Invincible power of genius!...

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[271]

CHAPTER IV. THE ANTS:—CIVIL WAR—EXTERMINATION OF THE COMMUNITY. It is the tyrant's punishment that he could not, even if he would, easily deliver his captive. So long as my nightingale sings, I know that he cares little for his cage, and I bear his captivity lightly; but when the time of song has gone by, I share his melancholy, and the question again and again recurs to my mind, "How can I release him?" He no longer knows how to fly; in truth, is almost without wings. If I set him free, he woul

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[272]

On the evening of the 8th of June, there was brought to me from the forest a great clod of earth, mixed with dry twigs, and especially with tiny débris of the Northern trees, such as the needles of the firs, or little prickly leaves resembling thorns. In the midst, the inhabitants pell-mell, of every size and grade, eggs, larvæ, nymphæ, diminutive artisans, great ants, which seemed to be warriors and defenders; finally, a few females which had just assumed their wedding garments, the wings which

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[273]

In their revolutions around our vase, they encountered upon the sand some ashy-black ants which had taken possession of our garden, and constructed underneath its soil a large establishment. The latter do not have recourse to timber, but build in masonry,—cementing the earth with their saliva, and drying and seasoning it with their formic acid. The spot was rendered peculiarly agreeable to them by its rose trees, apple and peach trees, which furnished them with abundant herds of gnats, that they

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[274]

And a death which seemed certain; for each of the big carpenters, as far as size and thews were concerned, was well worth eight or ten of the little masons. At the first collision we saw a big ant fall upon a brown dwarf, and annihilate it at one blow. The masons, however, had the advantage of numbers. But what of that? Suppose the front ranks were checked in the assault, and perished,—then the second, then the third,—if the army, still advancing, did but furnish the enemy with new victims? Such

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[275]

We longed to separate them. But how was it to be done? We were in the presence of infinity. A man's strength was nothing when tested against such multitudes. We might have proceeded to the extremity of a universal deluge,—a moment's noyade [P] —but even this would have proved insufficient. They would not have let go their death-grasp; and when the torrent had flowed by, the massacre would have continued. The sole remedy, and an atrocious one—worse even than the evil—would have been to have burne

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[276]

The gluttonous army of the lean threw themselves on the children. The latter, belonging to a superior race, were sufficiently heavy; and more, their oblong nymph-like envelope, round and smooth, offered no points of vantage. Two, three, four little blacks, by combining their efforts, succeeded, though not without difficulty, in carrying a single one of these up the smooth sides of the earthen vase. Then they came abruptly to a terrible resolve,—to seize upon the maillots , to bear off the naked

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[277]

One comprehends that in this stage of existence the milky and succulent nymphs of the ants will prove a very appetizing dish for the bird, and for the infinite number of creatures which hunt them greedily. I have dissected only one nymph in the last days of its nymph-period, and when near its time of hatching. But that one was sufficient. The sight (seen through a lens of twelve times magnifying power) was very painful. The being was completely formed, and already black on the belly, yellow on t

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[278]

I have explained this at some length, in order to make the reader understand the passionate interest felt by the ants in the little balls which, to our eyes, seem so insignificant. Beneath its soft and transparent tissue they feel the infant palpitating under its two touching forms,—the creature, denuded and innocent, which dreameth still—the creature already formed and intelligent, perceiving everything, but incapable of self-defence, and, before it sees the light, disturbed by all the fears an

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[279]

This immense execution upon the population and their young was hurried over so rapidly, that at three o'clock in the afternoon nearly all was ended; the city was sacked and depopulated in every corner, and its future beyond all hope of a resurrection. We thought that some fugitive might still be lurking in concealment; that perhaps the conquerors would abandon the desert if we transported them, with the destroyed city, into a paved coach-yard outside the garden; that then would awake in them the

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[280]

The unfortunate empty vase continually reminded me of what had occurred, and held me as by a spell. On the evening of the 11th we were still seated on the ground before it, with our chin in our hand, completely absorbed in thought. Our gaze plunged into its depths. We persisted in longing for a sign of life to appear upon its perfect immobility, a something which might still say that all was not finished. This firm resolve seemed to have the potency of an evocation, and as if our desires had rec

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[283]

CHAPTER V. THE WASPS: THEIR FURY OF IMPROVISATION. When the wasp on a summer's day enters at the window, with its loud, aggressive, and menacing zou! zou! zou! everybody is on his guard. The child trembles, the mother suspends her work, even the husband lifts his eyes: "Insolent, impudent intruder!" and he arms himself with a handkerchief. Meanwhile, the superb insect, having flown into every corner, and cast around the room a rapid and scornful glance, departs with a loud noise, not condescendi

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[284]

The slow dull animals of the genus Man are much scandalized at the proceedings of the wasp. It acts, it does not talk. But if it deigned to speak, its apology would be simple. A word would suffice. It is the being on whom Nature imposes the terrible destiny of suppressing time. We speak of the ephemera which lives a few hours: the period is sufficient for a creature that does nothing. The true ephemera is the wasp. In a brief six months' summer (not more than four months of full activity) it has

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[285]

Savage and alone, with its idea and its hope, this mother of the future commonwealth creates in the first place its citizens, some thousands upon thousands of labourers. You have already learned that among insects every worker is a female. These too are workers, but the harsh necessities of toil suppress in them their sex. They love with a lofty devotion. The austere virgin looks for no other spouse than the community. The chain of ardent labour is continued from the mother to her daughters. Her

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[286]

As it is without, so it is within. As the house, so too the inhabitant. We men are not yet sufficiently acquainted with the influence exercised upon our moral dispositions by our habitations. This duplication of walls, this potent envelopment of a people so completely shut up under its strong twofold enclosure, largely contributes to the unity of the commonwealth. Observe another singularity: shall we call it a trivial one? No; to the serious observer it is of importance. The city has two gates;

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[287]

To love the child and the future; to toil in view of time and of that which as yet is not; to exhaust their vitality and die of work, that posterity may have less cause to labour,—a noble ideal, assuredly, of society, wherever it may be. One can well understand it in those who have time before them, and a life to make use of, like men and bees. But that this insect which has no time, which perishes in the evening, should love the time that will never be its own, should immolate its little life f

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[289]

What do I say? Our virgins of Tauris do not wait until Nature lays upon them her heavy hand and the ignoble leaden shroud of winter. They have borne the sword; they will die by the sword. The republic ends in a general massacre. The children, recently, ay, and still, so dear, are slain; dilatory children whom cold and want would kill to-morrow; their sisters, aunts, and affectionate nurses securing them at least the advantage of dying by the hands of those who love them. This latter gift, a spee

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[293]

CHAPTER VI. "THE BEES" OF VIRGIL. All modern writers have triumphed over the ignorance displayed by the poet Virgil in his fable of Aristæus, who draws life out of the womb of death, and causes his bees to spring from the entrails of immolated bulls. [Q] But, for myself, I have never laughed at it. I know, I feel, that every word of this great sacred poet has a weighty value, an authority which I would designate as that of an augur and a pontiff. And the fourth book of the Georgics , particularl

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[294]

[Q] The passage to which Michelet refers is found in the fourth book of the Georgics , and is thus translated by Dryden:— "The secret in an easy method lies: Select four brawny bulls for sacrifice, Which on Lycæus graze, without a guide; Add four fair heifers yet in yoke untried: For these, four altars in their temple rear, And then adore the woodland powers with prayer. From the slain victims pour the streaming blood, And leave their bodies in the shady wood: Nine mornings thence, Lethean poppy

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[295]

An accident threw me into the way of understanding the poet's intention. On a certain memorable day, my wife and I repaired to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, to visit before winter the burial-places of my family, the tomb which reunites my father and his grandson. This latter had been born to me in the very year which terminated the first half of the present century, and I had named him Lazarus in my devout hope of the Awakening of the Nations. I had imagined that I saw upon his countenance a gl

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[296]

While making this reflection, we had finished climbing the hill; we stood in front of the tomb. And there, with admiration, with a species of astonishment, I found a surprising contradiction of what I had just been saying. About a score of very brilliant bees hovered above the little garden-plot,—which was narrow as a shroud, stripped of bloom and bare of flowers, and saddened by the influence of the season. In the whole cemetery remained only the last autumnal flowers,—some withering and half-l

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[297]

As if they had understood me, their movements afforded an exact reply. Some I saw, with their little limbs skilfully bent forward, rubbing their backs in the sun; they longed to absorb into every vein its genial radiance. They made the most of that brief hour when the sun revolves too quickly; one scarcely feels it before it has gone! Their significant gesture plainly said:—"Oh, what a cold morning we have had! Let us make haste! In less than an hour commences the equally inclement evening, the

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[298]

Their second period is passed under the earth,—in the shades,—where they sleep their chrysalis-like slumber. But when once they have quitted the place of sepulture, they are fully compensated for their previous abasement; a light aërial life, exempt from the bee's incessant toil, and glorified by golden wings, such as the latter never boasts of, is bestowed upon them, with the gift, moreover, of gentle manners. Innocent, and without stings, they live their season of love under the sun and among

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[301]

CHAPTER VII. THE BEE IN THE FIELDS. "When the plant attains to the flower, the climax of its existence,—when it assumes its symmetrical outlines, its perfumes, its colours, and a certain degree of animal irritability,—it emerges from its condition of isolation, and connects itself more closely with the great Whole. But it remains fixed in one place, without any reciprocation of love. The animal, on the contrary, is movement itself, and manifests its joy in living by its capricious mobility. Then

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[302]

"With a maternal care, the plant provides a place in its own body where the insect's egg may be developed. It nourishes the young larva which as yet is incapable of action, but which, in due time, emerging from its vegetation in the egg, will move freely to and fro, and seek its own sustenance. The creative fecundity of the plant easily replaces whatever the insect has extracted from it; and thus both animal and plant harmoniously attain to the climax of existence. "The animal, from its low sphe

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[303]

What the wind accomplishes hap-hazard, flinging abroad in capricious showers the generative elements, the insect performs through love,—the direct love of its species, the in direct and confused love of the amiable auxiliary which welcomes and nourishes it, which will hereafter nourish also its eggs and continue its maternal work. Its action, therefore, is not external and superficial, like that of the wind; it is internal and penetrating. The ardent, curious insect will not suffer itself to be

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[304]

The innocency of the bee is one of its lofty attributes, no less than its miraculous art. Its sting is simply a defensive and indispensable weapon, not against man-with whom, of its own accord, it does not wage war—but against the cruel wasps, its terrible enemies. The bee, on the other hand, injures none. It does not live by death; its inoffensive life does not demand the sacrifice of other lives. It stimulates innumerable existences; it vivifies and fecundates them. There is no uncultivated de

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[305]

The bee takes its stand at the bottom of these recesses worthy of the fairies, covered with the softest tapestry, under fantastic pavilions, with walls of topaz, and roofs of sapphire. Paltry comparisons these, for they are borrowed from dead gems, while the flowers live, and feel, and desire, and wait. And if the happy conqueror of the little hidden kingdoms,—if the imperious violator of their innocent barriers, the insect, mingles and confuses everything, they readily whisper its pardon, overw

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[306]

Genial, bland, and still is the hour which precedes the evening. Caressed by the last rays of the sun, whose warmth it preserves within its bosom, besprinkled in its corolla by the light and already radiant mist, the flower becomes conscious of two lives and a twofold electricity; it is urged to love, and it loves! The stamens blaze forth, and scatter abroad their cloud of incense. Then at that charming and sacred hour let the mediatrix come; let the Samaritan bee appear! Let her collect the swe

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[307]

"Night does not injure the bee, but cold is extremely harmful. Such is her conscientiousness, that, in order to avoid losing a day's labour in our brief summers, she takes too little heed of the sudden returns of winter, of the sharp caprices of the north wind, which sometimes visit us on the finest days. Insects of inferior intelligence, but also less industrious, perfectly understand the secret of escaping its influence. In their prudent idleness they say to one another, 'Tomorrow! Let us keep

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[311]

CHAPTER VIII. THE BEES AS ARCHITECTS: THE CITY. If the wasp's nest resemble Sparta, the bee-hive is the veritable Athens of the Insect World. There, all is art. The people—the artist-élite of the people—incessantly create two things; on the one hand, the City, the country,—on the other, the Universal Mother, whose task it is not only to perpetuate the race, but to become its idol, its fetish , the living god of the community. The bees share with the wasps, the ants, and all the sociable insects,

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[312]

All this has been long misunderstood. It was at first supposed that this State was a monarchy, that it possessed a king . Not at all; the king is a female. Thereupon one is driven to say, This female is a queen . Another error. Not only does she not govern, or reign, or control, but in certain conjunctions she is governed, and sometimes even placed in private confinement. She is at once something more and something less than a queen. She is an object of legal and public adoration; I should say l

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[313]

Was I wrong, then, in saying that this construction is truly one of "the living stones"? There is not an atom of the materials which is not three times impregnated with life. Who shall say of yonder hive whether the flower or the bee has furnished the greater part? The latter has certainly contributed an important share. Here, the home of the people is the people's substance and visible soul; from themselves they have extracted their city, and their city is, in truth, themselves. Bee and hive, i

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[314]

The building, as everybody knows, is destined to serve two ends. The cells are generally used in summer as cradles, in winter as magazines of pollen and honey,—a granary of abundance for the republic. Each vessel is closed and sealed with a waxen lid, a clôture religiously respected by all the people, who take for their subsistence only a single comb,—and when that comb is finished pass on to another, but always with extreme reserve and sobriety. It has been said and repeated that the constructi

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[315]

Thus, of their own accord, they vary the configuration and extent of the cellules. And they vary them yet more, according to the obstacles they encounter. If room be denied them, they reduce the size of their hexagons in due proportion and with extreme address. This fact Huber verified by some ingenious experiments. He bethought himself of deranging their operations by placing, instead of wood, a plate of glass against the wall of the hive where they were building up their cells. From the distan

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[316]

It was about the epoch of the American, and shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution. An unknown creature then made its appearance over all Europe,—of a frightful figure,—a great strong nocturnal butterfly, marked very plainly in tawny-gray, with a hideous death's head. This sinister being, which none had seen before, alarmed every countryside, and seemed an omen of the most terrible misfortunes. Yet, in truth, those who were terrified by it had brought it into Europe. It had come in

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[317]

It was the coup d'êtat of the brute creation, the revolution of the insects, executed by the bees, not only against their plunderers, but against the calumniators who had denied their intelligence. The theorists who had refused to believe in it, the Malebranches and the Buffons, were compelled to own themselves beaten. They had to adopt the reserve of eminent observers, like Swammerdam and Réaumur, who, far from questioning the genius of insects, furnish us with numerous facts in proof of its fl

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[321]

CHAPTER IX. HOW THE BEES CREATE THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMON MOTHER. In the life of the bees, all things are brought to bear on the welfare of the infant. Let us see, then, this object of love. Let us see what is lying at the bottom of the cell; her who has just been created, the little virgin of toil. She is born in a condition of singular purity; so much so that she is not even provided with the organ of the inferior necessities. On a delicate mixture of honey and flower dust, which is constantly

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[322]

No creature is more richly endowed with implements, or more obviously intended for an industrial speciality. Each organ reads her its lesson, and informs her what she has to do. Lighted by five eyes and guided by a couple of antennæ, she carries in front, projecting beyond her mouth, an unique and marvellous instrument of taste,—the proboscis, or long external tongue,—which is of peculiar delicacy, and partly hairy that it may the more readily absorb and imbibe. Protected, when at rest, by a bea

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[323]

It is here we reach the fundamental strata of the City, the aristocracy of devotion and intelligence. The wax-makers, or bee-architects, if they consulted the wishes of the living queen, would never train up an heiress to her throne. She is blindly jealous, and as soon as the successor is born would have her put to death. They do not listen. Those firm sage heads, remembering that we all die, take counsel on the necessity of perpetuating the race. And, accordingly, by the side of the cells, or c

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[324]

The characteristic attribute of this child of grace, of whom the whole multitude is enamoured, is certain beautiful long legs of gold, or rather of transparent amber, of a gilded yellow. This rich colour lends nobility to her belly, and is also found on the edge of her dorsal rings. Elegant, svelte , and noble, she is freed from the drudgery of dragging the industrial apparatus which overloads the worker,—brushes and panniers. Like all the bees, she carries a sword,—I mean the sting,—but never u

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[325]

This mother, say our authors, has a somewhat giddy head. Like all individuals who have nothing to do, she is volatile and capricious. At the end of a year's incubation and sedentary life in the depths of the hive, a desire seizes her for the open air, to see a little of the world, to visit new countries. She has, nevertheless, a more serious motive than they say. She sees the spacious chambers which are being built for the young mothers who will replace her. She feels that her rivals are conceal

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[326]

Meanwhile some prudent and faithful messengers are despatched from the cluster to examine the neighbouring localities best adapted for a new establishment. M. Debeauvoys was the first to observe this act of prudence, this special and prudent mission of inspection for the information and guidance of the new colony. A hollow tree, or a cavity in the rock, protected from the north wind, and near a brook where they can conveniently drink, are the conditions which weigh most with our prudent emigrant

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[327]

What would befall if, in these home-visits, she found herself face to face with the new queen whom the non-emigrating people have substituted in her place? There would be a combat. And this, too, happens without emigration, when, spite of all the efforts that are made to prevent her, a young mother, having forced her way through the wall of her apartment, reveals to the old queen the detested object of her jealousy. A duel then infallibly takes place. However, as each knows the other to be armed

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[328]

The last will be first. They turn to the youngest child of the people, who has barely opened her shell, who has not had time to undergo the confinement of a narrow cradle, who has not yet grown lean on the scanty fare of an artisan. This fare is not honey, but merely the dust of flowers which naturalists call bees' bread . Those who have been previously fed upon poorer fare will remain little; they no longer possess the faculty of transformation. But this young bee, so soft and so tender, will b

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[333]

The bee and the ant reveal to us the lofty harmony of the insect. Both, in their high intelligence, are of superior rank as artists, architects, and the like. The bee is more, a geometer; the ant is before all remarkable as an educator. The ant is frankly and strongly republican, having no need of a living and visible symbol of the community, lightly esteeming and governing with sufficient rudeness the soft and feeble females who perpetuate the race. The bee, on the other hand, more tender appar

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[334]

Observe that the most advanced works are executed by those (as, for example, the ants) who have no special implements to facilitate them, but must supply the want by skill and invention. Were they not so diminutive, what consideration we should extend to their arts and labours! Comparing the cities of the termites with the cabins of the negro, the subterranean galleries of the ants with the little excavations of our Tourangeaux of the Loire, how we should dwell on the superior skill of the insec

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[335]

Close daily observation, initiating us into their ways and habits, developed in our minds a sentiment which animated our study, but also complicated it,—respect for their persons and lives. "What say you? An ant's existence? Nature holds them cheaply, renews them incessantly, prodigalizes lives, sacrifices them to one another." Yes, but because she makes them. She bestows life and withdraws it; has the secret of their destinies, and that of the compensations in the course of possible progress. B

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[336]

Our first discussion of this kind was in reference to the fate of a very remarkable butterfly (a sphinx, if I mistake not), which we caught in a net to examine for a moment. I had admired it for several days, coming and going among the flowers,—not, like most of its race, flying hap-hazard, but choosing them discreetly, and then, with a very fine, very long and arrowy proboscis, sucking by small sips, and very quickly withdrawing, as if acted upon by a steel spring. The movement was one of incom

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[337]

A strong September wind is now blowing, and, this very day, has cast in upon us a beautiful reddish-coloured caterpillar. Though she had not come of her own accord, but in spite of herself, we felt that we ought to respect misfortune. We did not know from what plant she had been torn, but supposed from her motions that she had been carried away at the moment she had begun to spin. We presented her with a variety of leaves; but none of them pleased her taste. She moved to and fro, displaying an e

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[338]

Behold, then, microscope, and scalpel, and all our instruments expelled. What could we do? The confiding animal had taken up a position at our fireside, and would not withdraw from it. Life had driven out Science. Grave study, wait! for awhile thou art adjourned. During the winter we respected the sleep of the chrysalis....

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[341]

NOTE 1. The Meaning of this Book. —It has sprung wholly from the heart. Nothing has been given up to the intellect, nothing to systems. We have abstained from entering into scientific disputes. If the following formula should seem to you too systematic, pass over it. We have not sought to embody a dogma in it. We would only simplify, if possible, the point of view, and place it in the reader's power to embrace the whole significance of the book. The point of departure is violent. It is the gigan

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[342]

This powerful accelerator of the universal passage should destroy like fire. But to secure the sharpness of action such a mission requires, it is necessary that its own transformations be accelerated, its life compressed; that from love to death, and death to love, it revolve in a burning circle. However brief may be this circle, it cannot be accomplished but at the cost of painful metamorphoses, which resemble a series of successive deaths. Among most insects, marriage means the death of the fa

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[343]

But Nature, eluded by the effort and the toil,—I was going to say, the virtue,—does not lose its rights. Beaten on the one side, on the other it reacts upon the commonwealth, and grievously oppresses it. This self-protecting society, while rescuing immense multitudes from death and prolonging the common existence, multiplies the mouths to be fed, and is often overloaded. If its members would not die of famine, they must live on a very scanty regimen, must preserve alive a limited number of ferti

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[344]

An ignorant dogmatism had long asserted that the very perfection of these insect-societies depended on their automatism. But modern observation has proved, that if the conditions are varied, and unforeseen obstacles and difficulties placed in their way, they confront them with vigour and calm sense, and with the resources of an unfettered ingenuity, It is a world of method , which, at need, can show itself unrestrained . A world which, presently, in its original mission of combat and destruction

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[345]

These gleams, which so troubled the great Swammerdam, and made him recoil with dread, are precisely the circumstances that give me encouragement. Yes; all see, all feel, and all love: a miracle truly religious! In the material infinite which deepens under my eyes, I recognize, for my reassurance, a moral infinite. The individuality hitherto claimed as a monopoly by the pride of the chosen species, I see generously extended to all, and conferred even upon the least. The gulf of life would have se

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[346]

NOTE 3.—Book i., Chap. iii. On Insect Embryos, Invisible Animalcules, Infusorias as the Predecessors or Forerunners of the Insect, &amp;c. —The work of the vermets has been observed, in Sicily, by M. de Quatrefages.—As for the microscopic fossils, the infusorias, &amp;c., their great coup de théâtre has been Ehrenberg's discovery. See his Mémoires in the Annales des Sciences Naturelles , Second Series, vols, i., ii., vi., vii., viii. In volume i., p. 134, for 1834, he specifies the point

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[347]

Upon the living world, upon the processes at present in operation for the creation of little spheres, on those humble constructors who accomplish such great things, we owe all our information to the English voyagers, the Nelsons, [S] the Darwins, and others. They are minute and very simple observers, generally timid in their assertions, which have been of the boldest character, they having seen the very heart of the mystery, and caught Nature in the act. Read Darwin (whose researches have been m

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[348]

NOTE 4.—Book i., Chap. iv. ( Love and Death. ) On the Female Apparatus. —Réaumur,—and, in fact, every writer,—has admired the manner in which the weapons of war become the instruments of maternal love. M. Lacase, in a very beautiful thesis, the result of independent observations, and a continuation of the analogous works of an eminent master, Léon Dufour, has treated this subject with great anatomical preciseness. An original and important point of his labour is, undoubtedly, his demonstration,

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[349]

Yes; but in that case they would be just so far unfitted for the essential circumstance which ensures their development. Nature wishes them to be soft, ay, and very soft, that they may more easily undergo the moultings and painful changes which are imperative upon them,—which moultings, if the insect-substance were hard, would inflict upon it the most severe injuries. By instinct they are aware of this, and dread extremely lest their bodies should harden. The processionary caterpillars, for exam

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[350]

Has the insect a brain? It is a disputed question. The nervous apparatus which, in the molluscs, has not found, so far, a centre, tends, it is true, in the insect, towards centralization. Two longitudinal strings of nerves, which run through the entire length of the body, abut on the nerves of the head, which are not massed as in the higher animal. In the wasp, however, has been discovered a firm, whitish substance, strongly resembling the brain. But this would seem exceptional. Even in the head

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[351]

The Insect as Man's Auxiliary. —The ingenious work which I here confute, and which, assuredly, cannot be read with gratification, is entitled,— Les Insectes, ou Réflexions d'un amateur de la chasse aux petits oiseaux , par E. Gand, Lecture faite à l'Académie d'Amiens (26th December 1856). A remark which I make a few pages further on, in reference to the necessity of a popular teaching of natural history, well deserves to gain attention. The wealth and morality of the world would be doubled if th

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[352]

Paris possesses several fine collections of insects, besides that of the Museum. One of the best-known is Doctor Bois Duval's (lepidoptera). An establishment exclusively devoted to the sale of insects may be found at No. 17 Rue des Saints-Pères. The magnificent collection to which I refer on page 176, is that of M. Douë, who most readily showed it to us, and explained it with infinite complaisance. The anecdote which concludes chapter xii. ( The Ornament of Living Flames ) is related, in referen

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[353]

4th, In the forms, designs, and colours one detects in the thickness of the living tissue; as, for example, on lifting with the scalpel the strata of the wing-sheath of the beetles. Nature, which has so embellished the surface, has hidden, perhaps, still more beauty in the depth. Nothing is finer than the vital fluids, when seen in the mobility of their circulation, and in the delicate canals where that circulation is accomplished and defined. They speak to us less eloquently, and impress us les

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[354]

In reference to the spider's most terrible enemy, the ichneumon, some curious details are given in the fourth volume of the Memoirs of the American Society. In order to preserve it for its little ones, it does not kill its victim, but, if one may so speak, etherizes it by pricking it, and distilling into the wound a venom which apparently paralyzes it. My remarks on the terror of the male in his amorous advances are based upon those of De Geer, and Lepelletier, in the Nouveau Bulletin de la Soci

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[355]

The fact I have related in reference to the subterranean mining of Valencia by the termites, will be found in Humboldt's "Travels in Equinoctial America." As for La Rochelle, read the interesting chapter in M. de Quatrefages' Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste . NOTE 13.—Book iii., Chap. ii. The Ants. —The migrations of the tropical ants, say Azara and Lacordaire, sometimes last over two or three days. They are to be compared in continuousness and frightful numbers only to the clouds of pigeons which, i

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[356]

NOTE 14.—Book iii., Chap. iii. Flocks of the Ants. —Nearly every plant nourishes grubs, which are embellished with the most varied, and frequently the most dazzling colours. The rose-tree aphis, when I examined it through a microscope, seemed to me of a very pleasant bright green. Thrown on its back, it displayed a very big belly, and a very small ungainly head, which appeared to be neither more nor less than a sucker, while it agitated all its limbs. On the whole, I took it to be an innocent cr

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[357]

NOTE 16.—Book iii., Chap. viii. The Wax-making Bees. An Aristocracy of Artists. —I here follow, in the main, the authority of M. Debeauvoys, in his Guide de l'Apiculteur ("The Bee-keeper's Manual"), ed. 1853. In this little but important book he has made the all-important distinction which escaped Huber's notice, and separated the great wax-making architects from the little gleaners and nurses. But I ask his permission to trust rather to M. Dujardin on the general character of the bees. They are

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[358]

M. Pouchet, whom I have already cited several times, has been good enough to furnish me with a very interesting anecdote of the mason-bees:— "In Egypt and Nubia, which I traversed some few months ago, these hymenoptera and their buildings are so abundant that the ceilings of certain temples and those of some hypogea are entirely covered with them, and they absolutely mask the sculptures and hieroglyphics. These nests frequently form there a succession of layers; and in certain localities they ar

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[359]

Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery has also revealed to us the true character of the maternity of adoption, an admirably original characteristic of these insects, and the elevated law of disinterestedness and sacrifice which is the ennoblement of their communities. An undoubtedly inferior, but still distinguished merit to that of accomplishing great discoveries, is that of representing animals to us by pen or pencil in their true forms, their movements, and the general harmony of the things with wh

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[360]

Madame de Mérian, then, started from the silkworm. But her curiosity and artistic eagerness embraced everything. Contrasted with her dull and sombre Germany, Holland, with its rich American and Oriental collections, appeared to her like the great museum of the tropics. There she established herself, and with her pencil made its collections her own. Those faëry cemeteries, glittering with the beauty of the dead, did but whet in her the desire to investigate life in the region where it most luxuri

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[361]

How much more terrible would have been her task had she advanced further, had she opened and dissected her models, and forced her feminine pencil to the lugubrious painting of anatomical detail! And here we recognize the precise limit at which women are arrested in the study of the natural sciences. They are incapable of confronting it on both sides. Michael Angelo has finely said:—"Death and life are but one. They are the work of the same master and the same hand." But women do not submit. Betw

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[362]

Of all creatures, insects seemed the least worthy of being trained (or domesticated). They were sought only for their colours. Nevertheless, whoever sees in the pursuit nothing but a simple pleasure, will perhaps reflect for a moment when he learns that impaled insects frequently endure their torture for whole years! (See Lemahoux, and, particularly, the excellent Bulletin de la Société Protectrice des Animaux , September and October 1856.) In proportion as women understand the maternal instinct

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[363]

INTRODUCTION. I. THE LIVING INFINITE. The writer is moved by the voices of the Insect World, 17 Which leads him to reflect on its infinite numbers, 18 He refers to his loving study of the Bird, 19 But the Bird had a language; has the Insect?, 19 In many respects, it is an enigma which Man cannot read, 20 The Insect, however, has much to plead in self-defence, 21 And between it and Man the interpreter must be Love, 22 II. OUR STUDIES AT PARIS AND IN SWITZERLAND. How the writer was assisted by his

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[364]

BOOK THE FIRST.—METAMORPHOSIS. CHAPTER I.—TERROR AND REPUGNANCE IN CHILDHOOD. Extract from a Journal written by Madame Michelet, 57 In which she describes a visit to the home of her childhood, 58 Painful impressions produced by the ravages of the insect, 59 The writer comments on the repugnance with which the insect is viewed by childhood, 60 This repugnance is not shared by Nature, 61 Which protects and facilitates it in its work, 62 On account of its vast importance, 63 CHAPTER II.—COMPASSION.

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[365]

And how in each stage of growth the next is prefigured, 113 However numerous or great the changes, the individuality is preserved, 114 A future life is provided for, as in the case of the human embryo, 115 CHAPTER VII.—THE PHŒNIX. Out of gloom and obscurity emerges light, 119 The metamorphosis takes place, but the insect is not at a loss, 120 Nature furnishes each species with all its needs for the new life, 121 Its vital intensity is revealed by the brightness of its colouring, 122 Insects of g

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[366]

Of the value of certain insects as food, 170 As, for instance, in the case of the locust, 171 The law of retaliation illustrated, 172 CHAPTER V.—A PHANTASMAGORIA OF LIGHT AND COLOUR. How does the insect express its intensity of vital force? 175 In various ways, but specially through its glowing hues, 176 Which are displayed with a profusion that astonishes and almost overcomes the observer, 177 But are not inconsistent with an ingenious mimicry, 177 A diversion is made to the tropical forest, 17

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BOOK THE THIRD.—COMMUNITIES OF INSECTS. CHAPTER I.—THE TERMITES, OR WHITE ANTS. The habitations of the termites, erroneously called White Ants, described, both externally and internally, 235 , 236 A wonderful degree of skill shown in the erection of the great dome, 237 Yet the builders labour under specially difficult circumstances, 238 Their queen's fecundity; her offspring are tenderly treated, 239 Their numbers would be a terror to man, were they not checked by many enemies, 240 An illustrati

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A visit to the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, 295 Here certain lonely graves were haunted by a flight of bees, 296 Yet they were not true bees; they were two-winged, 297 They were "the Bees" of which Virgil had sung, 298 CHAPTER VII.—THE BEE IN THE FIELDS. Contrast between the Plant and the Animal, 301 Yet the one life in some points approaches the other, and a certain sympathy exists between the flower and the winged insect, 302 What the flower owes to the bee, 303 And how far the bee is indebted t

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